MetaCell Wellness Allowance (Ongoing Programme)

A note of compassion

In keeping with our mission of being a great place to work and having empathy for each other, we want everyone to know that MetaCell cares deeply about the wellbeing of people. The following document is an attempt to make remote work as comfortable as possible and promote work-life balance. If you have additional needs or ideas, please feel free to bring it up!

Sick Hours / Days Extension to Everyone

MetaCell wants to encourage any of us that might be feeling unwell to use the #SICK tag to block a morning / afternoon / whole day to practice wellness for ourselves so that we can recover from illness without added stress. If possible, people should let their project manager know in advance of using this special tag and log SICK leave through this form. Project managers are encouraged to support this practice as needed. #SICK hours will be essentially paid sick leave. This measure will be in place for everyone and we are all entrusted to use this benefit fairly.

Mental Health counts for Sick Hours / Days

At MetaCell, mental health is considered as important as physical health. Much of our work requires our brains to be fully engaged and a prerequisite for high performance is we manage our stress levels as well as possible. MetaCell wants to encourage any of us that might be feeling emotionally or mentally unwell as a result of stress in the coming weeks should follow the same policy of using the #SICK tag described above.

Physical Activity

Access to regular gyms and other sources of physical activity may be limited or restricted in this period of time. Keep in mind that staying active is still really good for our mental health! Here are a few links to inspire activities that we can do anywhere!

• First, some inspiration
• Quarantine Home Exercises
• The scientific 7 minute workout
• Angeliki Kilanioti for online yoga classes

Wellbeing allowance

A wellbeing allowance of up to $50/month is being extended to all employees and contractors. This can be used to cover costs of anything that will help us feel good and healthy in our home office environment. As an example people might want to expense home office equipment, books, a Yoga mat for home exercise or a meditation app subscription (some of us have found that meditation is a good way to deal with stress in general) or even a Netflix or a Spotify subscription. Also basic health equipment such as masks and hand sanitizer will be expensable as part of the wellbeing allowance. Just make sure to add a row in your invoice and submit an expense report with receipts with it (in the same PDF) if you are a contractor, or simply submit an expene report ifyou are an employee. Alessandra and Giselle can help you out with this.

Resources

Equipment examples

• Yoga mat
• Yoga blocks
• Kettlebells
• Fitball
• Stretching belt
• Tiger Balm White
• Surgical mask, hand sanitizer, antibacterial tissues

Apps

Meditation

• Calm.com (if 5 or more are interested we can get a discounted bulk rate for MetaCell as a whole)
• Headspace.com

Fitness

• DownDog
• Beachbody.com
• Les Mills Workouts
• Seven

Potential Impact on Daily Schedules

As we are all working from home offices, some of us are likely to be occasionally joined by spouses, partners, our children or other friends / family in your workspaces. This may somtimes impact our routines for work in some way, for example it might reduce our ability to work regular hours during the day or to on occasion miss entire days due to forces outside our control. If and when this happens outside of our control we should all feel free to discuss changes in our working routine with the other team members and project coordinators so that we can plan around it nd support each other as a team.

Regular Check-ins

Alessandra and Giselle will check in with each of us regularly and see how everybody is doing and if anybody needs support. If you are needing help or support, please let her know and she’ll do her best to facilitate with full support from the company.