Prioritizing Wellness at Skedulo in 2022

Earlier this month, Skedulo held our second annual Wellness Week. The five day calendar of events gave us all an opportunity to re-center, engage in activities that promote health and wellbeing, and check in with the people around us.

Wellbeing is an area that our CEO, Matt Fairhurst is extremely passionate about—especially as it relates to Skedulo Heart and caring for our employees.

During the planning phase we to analyzed feedback from last year's event to ensure that this year was even more special for our employees. This included being proactively inclusive of our remote workforce, as well as taking steps to tailor activities to specific geographic regions.

Some of the activities we scheduled as a result of this included:

• nutritional webinars
• financial training
• volunteer events
• hub meet-ups

New activities were complemented by the return of last year’s favourites, such as No Internal Meetings Day and the Count.it Fitness Challenge.

We were also excited to welcome back last year’s keynote speaker, Dr. Susan Biali Haas—a renowned expert in health and wellbeing. Her presentation centered on setting boundaries within teams, as well as the importance of nutrition and sleep for optimising the brain and performance.

Wellbeing means different things to different people

Post event the feedback on the volunteer events was exceptionally heart-warming. Our staff really enjoyed supporting a food bank to package items for families and neighbors in need, and preparing meals for people experiencing homelessness and addiction.

The key takeaway from Wellness Week was that wellness means very different things to different people. For some, it may be nutrition or fitness. For others it may be a slow walk, being in nature, spending time with their pet, or practicing mindfulness during the day.

We were able to highlight and celebrate these differences with our Wellness Raffle, where people were encouraged to submit a picture of themselves doing the activity represented wellness to them. At the end of the raffle, 4 winners were selected from each region and awarded a prize.

All individual feedback from the team participating in Wellness Week 2022 will be used to shape next year’s calendar of events.

Giving myself permission to take a break

Personally, i’ve been training for a Spartan race. So I found the Count.it challenge exceptionally helpful and motivational. I loved being around others who were supportive and engaging, and it reminded me of when I used to play team sport.

As the Wellness Week organiser, it is stressful bringing together all the activities to make sure everyone has a great experience. This year though, I gave myself permission to take breaks and slow down…which is exactly what Wellness Week is about. I found this really valuable, and enjoyed taking the time to recenter myself and re-connect with our internal community.

Thank you to everyone who assisted with Wellness Week—our Office Manager team, People Ops team, EAs, leadership team who helped to bring life into our ideas.

Here’s to Wellness Week 2023, which I’m hoping will be an even better one!