We started a Wellness Mentor Program at Bilot together with LovelyLife. This project is supported by The Finnish Work Environment Fund. With this project we are gathering our own “Bilot’s core team”, who will be our wellness mentors network. In this blog series our Wellness Mentors shares their thoughts and experiences during this journey.
I joined Bilot over 11 years ago and work in our SAP BI team. At the time I was the 43th employee and it’s fair to say that I knew all the people working in our company at least by name. Today, we are a company spread to 3 countries with over 200 employees on board. It’s easy math – chances of really knowing your colleague who you just might do your next project with – and in times of our Covid-19 restricted lives – have been diminished.
So, something needed to be done for this. How to improve the group and team cohesion and keep on fulfilling the One Bilot statement? At Bilot, a Wellness Mentor program was introduced and it kicked off in early February 2021 with a group of 15 people becoming wellness mentors. We have an outside coaching partner LovelyLife in this to support us and as one of the future mentors, I am glad to give you readers the first sneak peek on the learnings and ideas arisen so far.
Sense of trust. Having fun. Sharing is caring. Really listening or just multitasking?
These are just some of the first topics we’ve touched upon by now when thinking about what well-being is all about for us bilots. Especially listening and its different six (yes, believe there are six of them!) levels*) ranging from passive (lowest format being the kind where listener is there but thoughts are in something else) to active modes of listening (highest format being the one in which listener listens to learn and doesn’t directly try to understand everything) were in focus of our very first session.
How does listening relate to well-being? Well, I bet most of us have been in meetings where people are not really present and listen, but doing something completely else – often referred to as multitasking. There are even work ads in which companies are looking for “virtuous multitaskers”.
Sure, all of us cannot always be 100% present and sometimes we are just hearing instead of listening, actively changing focus, but I cannot help thinking if this really is a productive way of working for anyone in the long run? At least for the brain it seems to be very exhausting and there’s also a lot of research on the matter as well, from the early 1990s already. **)
So next time, when you are at a meeting – stop for a moment and think what kind of listener you are. When you might feel tempted to do something else, think if it is actually necessary or could you simply focus on one thing at a time?
Seeing really what the sustainable way to well-being is all about, however, is something companies could be looking into. It’s easy to agree on the rationale that happy employees are also the productive ones and simply keep organizing beer tastings or similar. However, going deeper into holistic well-being – what e.g. drives a person, what could be done to improve the well-being more holistically – is then a bigger effort.
I’m pleased that Bilot as a company has now made its first official and public step towards a happier community through the Wellness mentoring program. I am looking forward to an inspiring journey with my colleagues at Bilot with this one and invite you to read further our blog series on feelings and ideas what this program brings us.
*) Source: Paul Burns: Psychology of Mind, 2001
**) E.g. Harold Pashler: Attentional limitations in doing two tasks at the same time, Current Directions in Psychological Science 1, 1992
This blog is part of a series in which Bilot’s Wellness Mentors talk about their experiences with the program. See all the blog posts here »
