Tips For Small Team Wellness (With AI)

To help your business thrive, prioritize your team’s wellness front and center. Leading with care and intention is more than good management. Many people feel stressed or overworked, impacting their productivity and happiness. Team wellness is especially important for small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners now more than ever. With limited time and resources, supporting your team’s wellness is a top priority.

It can be hard to focus on your team’s wellness while focusing on business, but there’s always a way. We’re here to help with practical and easy-to-implement tips that won’t break your bank. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out or have been running your business for years. These strategies will help you create a workplace where your team will love Mondays.

What we’ll cover:

• What is team wellness and why does it matter for small businesses?
• Where to start: Your wellness toolkit
• How AI can help you with team wellness
• Tips to maintain your team’s wellness
• Integrate wellness with the right tools and resources

What is team wellness and why does it matter for small businesses?

Team wellness refers to the overall health, happiness, and performance of a group of individuals working together towards a common goal. It encompasses various aspects, including:

• Physical Wellness: Promoting healthy habits, such as regular exercise, balanced nutrition, and sufficient rest among team members.
• Mental and Emotional Wellness: Fostering a positive and supportive team culture, managing stress, and encouraging open communication.
• Social Wellness: Building strong relationships, trust, and a sense of belonging among team members.
• Professional Wellness: Supporting career development, providing opportunities for growth, and recognizing achievements.

Every person’s wellness is important. Taking the time to understand what that means could be great success for your growing business. Here are some compelling reasons why investing in your team’s wellness is crucial to your SMB’s success:

Better productivity and performance: According to Wrike, happy teams are about 13% more productive than their unhappy counterparts. When they feel supported and cared for, they’re more likely to perform at their best. High turnover rates can be costly for businesses, so maintaining a positive work environment is essential for retaining talent

Attract and retain better talent: A healthy workplace can be a major draw for top talent. In fact, employee benefits are often the third most important factor in job choice, after salary and flexible work arrangements.

Save money: The cost of recruiting and training new staff can be as high as $4,700 for a typical role to over $28,000 for an executive position.

Build brand ambassadors: Your team’s well-being reflects in their work, and services. According to State of the Connected Customer Report, 43% of customers stopped buying from a brand due to poor customer service. When they’re happy teams, they are more likely to be enthusiastic brand ambassadors, which can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Now, you know how important it’s to give your teams the work-life they deserve. But the question is how? Here’s how, especially with artificial intelligence (AI):

Where to start: Your wellness toolkit

Start by building your wellness toolkit. You can begin by reviewing your human resource (HR) data. Review your team’s paid time-off, medical expenses, and basic team information. This helps frame out your team’s working hours, coverage, reducing burnout, or the need for more flexibility in schedules.

To gather this information easily, you can use a few tools, like:

• Customer relationship management (CRM): Use a CRM to track every team’s activity, work hours, and leave data for quick trend spotting.
• Survey tools: Design feedback and survey questions to regularly gauge work-life balance, stress levels, and job satisfaction. Some CRMs offer built-in feedback features for convenience.
• Communication tools: Tools like Slack monitor your team interactions. Look for patterns that might indicate disconnection, like reduced participation or increased conflict.
• Personality assessments: Tests like Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness (DISC) and the Enneagram can help understand individual personality traits and behavioral styles. Get insights into how different personalities work together.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) tools: Train your team on AI tools to mitigate mundane tasks, aid in creating wellness plans, and even coaching your teams.  

Ask your team

Conduct anonymous surveys or hold open discussions to understand how your employees are feeling. You can ask questions like, “Do you feel supported by your team?” Just like asking for customer feedback on products. Find out what they don’t like, so you can make improvements. Then address their concerns and monitor the team’s progress.

Identify stressors and challenges

Try to figure out what’s causing stress or discomfort for your team, if any. Is it workload, communication issues, or something else? You can then work on solving that problem.

How AI can help you with team wellness

When you’re dealing with a small team, you might be able to manage it manually. But as you scale fast, you’ll need help. That’s where AI can help you. It can help you organize your data, suggest, and recommend where you can improve and give you new ideas, if you need. 

Here are some AI tools that can help you make your team wellness effort effortless:

Team organization: For organizing your HR data, the easiest way is using an AI-powered CRM. It’ll help you keep all the information in one place. For communication and keeping your team engaged, go for Slack. You can use it to directly talk to your team or send team messages on channels.

Wellness apps: Apps like Insight Timer and Thrive Global create a hyper-personalized health experience, from one one one to coaching and courses. They focuses on daily behaviors: mindfulness, sleep, food, fitness, stress management, and connection. Get daily mindfulness habits in place and advice and nudges to improve health outcomes.

AI agents: When you’re ready to scale to Pro Suite, activating Foundations will enable AI for your CRM. AI agents built with Agentforce 360 can save your team’s mental efforts. It can understand and respond to even complex queries in a humanlike manner, providing accurate and helpful information around the clock.

Tips to maintain your team’s wellness

It’s time to fill your box with some useful tips on how you can maintain the wellness of your SMB teams with help of AI:

Use AI tools and apps

AI tools and apps use AI agents that make your life easier by undertaking major tasks. Here are some suggestions on how you can use AI apps or tools: 

• Mental health support: Virtual healthbots like Clare&Me and Limbic Care can offer 24/7 mental health support through their AI “therapy companions”, helping your teams manage stress and anxiety.
• Fitness coaching: Apps such as Whoop Coach and Fitbit Premium analyze biometric data (heart rate, sleep, activity) to create workout plans with the help of AI, tailored specifically for each person. They adjust as you improve, offering real-time advice. 
• Smart eating plans: Lifesum or Noom offer AI-driven nutrition tracking and personalized meal suggestions. You can invite your team to use these apps or share AI-generated nutrition plans via wellness programs.
• Time management: Smart calendars and task managers then help balance workloads so teams don’t get overwhelmed and can enjoy a better work-life mix. Tools like Clockwise and Slack (for task management) to analyze calendars and work patterns, optimizing schedules to prevent overload.
• Connect socially: Slack comes with AI-powered apps like Melting Pot or Crewting that randomly pair team members up for virtual coffees, fun team activities based on shared interests, or mentorship chats.
• Prioritize overall wellness: Pick wellness platforms like Personify Health and Empuls that personalization for fitness, mental health, nutrition, and engagement tracking in one platform.

Protect your privacy and data

Always choose AI tools that prioritize data security and follow laws. Many wellness tools publicly list their compliance credentials. Use vendors compliant with GDPR and HIPAA standards. Always review privacy policies and ensure employee data is encrypted and access-limited.

Keep an eye on results 

Use AI analytics to track how your wellbeing programs are doing. See what’s working, track the trends, and celebrate the wins to keep your team engaged and healthy. Most AI wellness platforms include analytics dashboards that track employee participation, mood, and health trends. But you can consider using simple tools like Google Forms or Typeform for ongoing pulse surveys paired with AI insights from your platform.

Set up team events

Motivation can come in many forms, so branching out here for your team is important. Plan fun team-building activities like outings, sports, or social events (holiday parties, potlucks) to foster community, motivation, and build stronger relationships. Ensure activities are accessible for hybrid or remote teams by scheduling virtually or at flexible times.

Emphasize rest and recovery

Most businesses don’t encourage rest, but it’s an essential part of a wellness strategy. Encourage regular breaks, using vacation days, and provide relaxation resources or techniques. Supporting rest helps prevent burnout and sustains long-term productivity.

Integrate wellness with the right tools and resources

Wellness starts with you. And if you’re here, it means you care about yourself and your employees. And with all the steps and tools, now you also know where to start, and how to plan and execute your plans. Just start small and slow, keeping in mind your employees’ priorities in mind. 

To help you, we’ve gathered some small business resources for wellbeing that may help you on your journey:

• Self-Motivation
• Learn Management Best Practices
• Lead During Challenging Times 
• Learn Drucker School MBA Essentials 
• Embed Equality in Your Business

And, here’s your CRM roadmap for additional help. Start your journey with a Starter Suite today. Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations and try out Agentforce 360 today.

AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.