WELLNESS AT ENTO
How we think about Wellness
The dimensions of wellness
Wellness can be thought about as comprised of 7 dimensions:
Emotional
Also known as mental wellness, emotional wellness is our ability to understand and accept ourselves, our resilience and coping mechanisms, and our ability to connect with our emotions and understand what is driving them.
Environmental
Environmental wellness is about being connected to the great outdoors. Spending time in nature is proven to have an impact on overall wellness, improving stress levels, mood and concentration.
Physical
Physical wellness is about taking proper care of our bodies to enable them to function in a way that enables us to feel good. It encompasses nutrition, activity and exercise.
Intellectual
Intellectual wellness covers our ability and opportunity to engage in creative and stimulating activities, our ability to open our minds to new ideas and experiences that can benefit our personal and professional lives.
Social
Social wellness is about building and maintaining positive relationships that add value to our lives. It’s the ability and opportunity to connect and relate to others.
Spiritual
Spiritual wellness is about our ability to be fulfilled in what we do by aligning our personal values with our actions.
Occupational
Occupational wellness is the fulfilment that we gain from the work we do. Influenced by the suitability of that work to our interests, skills, and values, it’s not just paid employment, but side-hustles, volunteer work, hobbies and life roles such as parenthood.
Balancing the dimensions of wellness
Finding your happy place.
The seven dimensions almost certainly won’t all resonate equally for you. For some, one dimension may have a greater impact on wellness than the rest. For others, one or more dimensions may have little to no impact on their wellness at all.
You may also find that the dimensions impact heavily on each other – for example, environmental wellness on emotional wellness. All of these scenarios are okay! The dimensions are simply a framework to help you think about wellness and discover different ways to keep you feeling good and functioning well.
Wellness as a concept is entirely subjective. If you are feeling good and functioning well that is enough. It’s not a competition – you can’t be ‘more well!’ The dimensions of wellness shouldn’t be viewed as boxes to check to be objectively considered ‘well.’
Our approach to Wellness
Ento's approach to wellness
Proactive
We’re striving to be proactive in our approach to wellness. Wellness is about more than the absence of disease or affliction (both mental and physical), it’s about feeling good and functioning well.
We’ve learned what burnout looks like and we don’t want to see anyone at Ento experiencing that again.
Our approach to wellness is to give you access to tools and time to proactively support the dimensions of wellness relevant to you.
Individual
Everyone is unique. What impacts our wellness is different. The balance we strike and how much emphasis or value we place on each dimension will be different from person to person.
We’ve approached wellness by looking at ways we can support individual needs.
Driven by our values
Ento’s values underpin everything we do and, amongst our core values, transparency and openness standout as key to wellness. These values are about how we communicate with those around us.
We want dialogue to be open in all directions and to create an environment where it is normal to take proactive care and seek support when required.
Shared responsibility
Ento believes that wellness is a shared responsibility. As an employer we want to do our bit to create an environment that supports the wellness of everyone in the team through policy, process and initiatives.
The interconnectedness of emotional wellness
How we live emotional wellness outside of policy
We spend a lot of time working together and, as a result, our wellness is inevitably interconnected and has impacts on others. Particularly when we’re talking about emotional wellness.
It’s super important to remember the role that you can play in others wellness and look for ways to both help each other out and watch out for each other.
How do you do this? The simplest way is checking in on each other. RuOK is both a great question to start with and a source of resources to help you out.
If you are worried about someone and you are concerned they aren’t asking for help, it’s not out of line to speak with someone about your concerns. Whether it’s their manager, your manager, Hannah or Aulay, we will be here to help both you and them.
Wellness allowance
Core to our proactive approach is our Wellness Allowance
Wellness is incredibly individual and the (proactive or reactive) support everyone needs is equally individual. And so rather than jam in a ‘one size fits all’ solution, we created an allowance of $500 per person per year to enable everyone at Ento to access what works best for them.
We’re pretty flexible about what people spend their allowance on – everything from sporting equipment to musical instruments, mindfulness apps, massage and financial planning.
Our guiding principles for what the allowance can be spent on are:
Principles
- Wellness allowance should support one of the seven dimensions of wellness
- Aim for proactive support
- Seek evidence based approaches
