The email HR should have waiting in your inbox on January 1st 2012

Christmas is coming fast and with it that annual angel/demon where you are already forgiving yourself for indulging two sizes in the wrong direction with the promise that starting Jan 1st you really honestly will do something about your health.

Of course, businesses do this too. They get to the end of the year, worked and at the moment increasingly partied out, and in the back of their minds they take stock and make very real commitments to making 2012 different, to focusing on improving the health and wellbeing of the bottom line.

Question is, is there a link? Between commitments to improving the health of your business and your own personal vows? I don’t mean, would your business survive next year if you had to be winched out of your bedroom by a crane in January (although that might do it). When I mean health, I also mean psychological and physical health. I mean would the wellbeing of your business be measurably improved if the business and you the employee (whatever your role) made it an explicit targeted measurable goal to make the business more healthy by making everyone in it more healthy?

Put it this way. What if your business sent you this email on Jan 1st:

Dear Max (my dog’s name as it happens, but go with it)

Hope you had a really great Christmas and welcome back. To get things going – and staying – on the right track for 2012, we’ve decided to do things differently.

Firstly, we’ve decided that it is our business to create a working environment and give you a job that makes you healthy. That it is our business to care about your health and wellbeing, physical and mental. Not just in terms of nutritional food in the canteen, or improved crèche facilities, or marketing ourselves as a great place to work: we mean in the proactive removal of anything and EVERYTHING in your job negatively affecting your health and wellbeing.

So to get the ball rolling, we want to hear some very different New Year’s Resolutions.

• What health targets and plans and facilities we could offer that would make a difference to you (and your families)
• What things (people, processes, ways of doing things around here) that are getting in the way of making your job make you happy (that we can happily change)

Tell us – be honest - and we’ll tell you what we’ll do about it. As adults. Working together. In 2012, we’ll do our part – putting money and board air time where our mouth is – to make you smile when you come to work, to know that the work that you are doing here is the best work of your lives. If you want to work with us to achieve this, were with you all the way. The health of our business depends on it.

HR

This is a little cheesy of course, but you get my point. Certainly much better than welcome back, can we meet to discuss your workload, cos we’ve got a shedload to get through.

For more on this, check out the free Collaborative Wellbeing – A People Resolutions New Year Manual.