As an entrepreneur, it’s important to create a culture of well-being in your workplace. Don’t overwork yourself to the point that it’s impacting your mental, physical, and social health! In this lesson, our expert, Meryl Vedros, talks about incorporating the idea of wellness and balance into your work. Watch how this will result in positive results for your business success!
Transcript
From my perspective, the idea of 40 hour work week is a ridiculous one that Henry Ford came up with in response to the assembly line worker. We were expected to sit at their desk for eight hours a day, every day. And eventually, it leads to people being exhausted and unhappy. In America, if you add on top of that two-week vacation time, you get people whose bodies hurt. Many people live in chronic pain. They never see the world. They really end up living in a bubble. There was an economist in the 1930s, who predicted by 2030 everybody would work 15 hours. And that’s something that in the past three years has really interested me with our studio. And as a result, we work 30 hours a week, so we take Mondays off. Or if we need to work on Mondays, we have them for meetings only. And that I actually read in an ADHD book on mental health about ways to divide up your time. It’s been a really useful one for me and knowing that, my right brain can live on and thrive on Tuesdays through Fridays and if I do need to be working on those Mondays, they’re meetings only. So that’s the left part of my brain doing its work. It’s scheduling, it’s taking new client emails, it’s taking notes, it’s doing everything that’s organizing and tracking information that will transition into the right part of my brain week.
One of the best pieces of advice I got from my father, who’s an independent business owner, was to try and figure out how you can manage your schedule and your work balance early before you have children or before you start a family if that’s what you want to do, so that when you do have a family or children, you’ll be able to balance it. You won’t have to rewire your brain and being able to come home from work and only be used to being in front of the computer from 8:00 AM in the morning until 9:00 PM at night. That I believe is a really big struggle for a lot of people. So it’s relevant with startups and knowing that if you create a good foundation for mental health and work-life balance early, you’re setting your team up for success later on. They’re more likely to stick with you in the long run because they’ll know they’ll be able to grow their personal lives. They’ll be happy in their work lives.
For the first three months, so first 1200 days of Vedros Studio practicing a 30 hour work week our studio tripled in size and tripled in revenue. We saw drastic changes in the happiness for everybody in the office, even allowing our clients to know what we were practicing was amazing and their response to who we are as people, not just as a service offering. And I believe we gained a lot of respect in that space as well. When cold calls came through the door or when new emails came through the door from potential clients we would let them know that we weren’t working on Mondays or that we’d have meeting only days. And they really responded well to that. It was great in our reducing costs. So 20% of operational or maintenance fees went down. So the environmental changes as well for us, the carbon emissions that we were saving were great. Our business wasn’t spending as much money and ultimately everybody was happier.
Being a person in your personal life and in your work life, it’s about creating boundaries and sticking to them. And to be able to implement a 30 hour work week, you have to do it. You have to own it and not be afraid of talking about it to other people. I believe that mental health and work-life balance is something that needs to be normalized. It needs to be practiced and people really need to own it. If you scroll back through a couple of months on Vedros Studio’s Instagram, you can see I think six or seven posts we did on the four day work week and how it helps our carbon footprint, how that helps our business grow and what research findings we found across the world for companies and businesses and countries. Changing this conversation. But again, the most important thing that if you do it, it’s also about talking about it. One for our studio, at least me personally, is I don’t want to be working with clients who don’t respect mental health and boundaries for our work and personal life. If I have clients that are calling me up on my personal phone on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday, Sunday evening, that’s a red flag for me. If I have clients who are excited to hear that we’re practicing a four day work week for our mental health to be able to be better creative and kinder humans, then I’m all about working for them, even at a reduced rate. That to me is a foundation for great relationships and if people don’t respect them, move along. There’s 8 billion people in the world. There’s plenty to go around.
