Smart businesses are taking a more strategic approach, moving away from tactical interventions, and making a step change in how they manage their workforce and workplace in the post-pandemic world.
Rather than see the wellbeing of employees as something to be celebrated just once a year, these businesses are realising that the development of workplace cultures, systems and organisation designs are key to the delivery of business goals and sustainable high performance.
These are the businesses that are moving away from a tick box, superficial, event-based, programmatic approach to workplace wellbeing and replacing it with a strategic, data-driven, evidence-based approach which targets limited resources to the biggest presenting needs of the employees.
We need to do the fundamentals very differently.
Don’t give me a digital app to address my mental health concerns when the real issue is too high work demands like those facing frontline medical staff in Ireland’s A&Es daily.
Don’t arrange a desk massage for me while you are making my life a misery with bullying behaviours.
Don’t wait until I resign before you offer me more money in a bid to make me stay.
Don’t micromanage me and expect me to keep a set of rules that are outdated when you should be building a high-trust relationship.
The key is the creation of a healthy workplace with healthy employees.
It is of course a two-way street. While employers need to create workplaces that are built to reduce and mitigate the natural stress-rich work environment of today, employees need to turn up to work ready to deliver.
Last year, Healthy Place To Work published research which revealed just how important the health and wellbeing of employees is to delivering optimum output and performance. Our research was conducted by Trinity College Dublin and based on over 12,000 responses from employees in 18 companies across eight countries globally including Ireland. The survey found that four aspects – financial; social; psychological; and physical health – contribute greatly to an employee’s general health and intention to stay with their employer. In addition, it reduces sick leave, another essential component of an organisation’s success and performance.
Organisational wellness culture, developed by senior leaders and managers, is found to be significantly linked to all four aspects of employee health. If leaders develop a healthy culture, with psychological safety at its core, the whole system becomes stronger and delivers superior results.
We need to start challenging those leaders who view employees as replaceable resources to be utilised like machines or as simply a means of production. Instead, we need empathetic leaders who are seen as role models for healthy behaviours and who authentically care about the health and well-being of their staff every day. These are the leaders who inspire loyalty and achieve high organisational performance.
It is not a case of organisation delivery versus employee wellbeing but rather of workforce health fuelling organisational performance.
So ditch the gimmicks and the tricks and the well-being washing and commit instead to placing workforce health as your biggest driver of creating a sustainable high-performing workplace. And once we get that right, we can enjoy a massage!
