Businesses shell out a significant amount of their regular budget to market products and services to various audiences. Marketing strategies reach out externally: tapping into markets that are potential customers to boost sales. But one often neglected strategy requires looking inside company structures, and that is paying attention to employees.
Having a satisfied employee base is one of the strongest marketing moves your company can make. Happy employees create a healthy work environment. They also can be your business’s biggest ambassadors.
One way to prioritize employee welfare is to hold corporate training programs that respond to their concerns. These training sessions should address their needs and equip them to work together better. As an employer, you may do this by including self-defense training in your programs.
Why Self-defense?
Upon first glance, self-defense training may not appear relevant in your employees’ wellness program. But a company that seeks to stay ahead of the game continually works towards its future. This means supplying employees with skills that protect them.
Self-defense should be considered a standard in wellness programs because safety is a basic need to function in any environment. Lack of security is an unnecessary source of stress in the workplace. Self-defense lessons, hand in hand with ample office security measures, reassure employees that their personal safety is not an afterthought but an essential part of operations.
Companies should see employees as an asset and integral part of business growth. Self-defense lessons emphasize this.
Corporate Self-defense Plan for Employees
Because it is not a route usually taken, your company may be at a loss regarding how to approach self-defense lessons for employees. A good place to start is that a self-defense program should include both physical strategies and mental techniques.
Physical Training
While physical techniques are necessary for self-defense, your businesss may also want to approach experts such as Evolve Range Solutions. They have the latest target shooting systems that can equip your employees with important skills for emergencies. Companies like these also have expert knowledge that they can impart about safe firearm use and proper applications and storage in the corporate context.
Besides education on proper firearm use, have sessions that demonstrate and allow for proper defense techniques. These lessons should familiarize company staff on basics such as evading or blocking incoming attackers or immobilizing them to escape an untoward situation.
Physical training should also have a session that introduces employees to different self-defense weapons that they must carry daily. These are highly practical, especially since office-based employees do a good deal of commuting to and from the workplace regularly.
The unfortunate truth is that there are many possible dangerous scenarios, and not all can be predicted. However, self-defense is great protection for your employees’ day-to-day activities.
Mental Awareness
Self-defense does not stop with physical training. It should also provide lessons on how to be mentally alert in a variety of situations.
One that is especially helpful is environmental awareness, in which employees learn to assess situations that may be dangerous. Understanding the kind of setting helps in making the best judgment of a specific circumstance.
Since verbal conflicts occur most often for many people, lessons that discuss how to resolve heated situations peacefully are essential. These may include how to recognize such situations and practice in hypothetical scenarios. Successfully defusing a verbal confrontation avoids further concern about physical safety.
Note: It is best to have an initial discussion with your team on what kind of scenarios and skills they think are essential to know and integrating these into the training sessions.
Why Prioritizing Employees Works
It has been previously stated that pushing for self-defense training for employees informs them of the care a company has for their overall well-being. And a good reputation, especially among your own staff, does wonders for business.
A 2015 study by the Social Market Foundation reveals that happy employees are 20% more productive than those who are not happy. A boost in productivity also means better teamwork and better work output.
Do away with the idea that employee happiness only affects their personal lives. Employee happiness is beneficial to your business as a whole.
As a guide on how to recognize if your employees are happy at work, Forbes cites author Patrick Lencioni as boiling it down to three factors:
- Feeling like people know who they are and that it matters
- Feeling like their efforts have an impact
- Feeling like they are making progress
Reflect on these and see how well your company stands by these principles. Remember that investing in your employees may be your greatest business strategy yet.
