The reality of wellbeing programmes: what’s your responsibility?

The workplace, wellbeing industry and employers need to work together to develop solutions and services that have a sustainable effect on the lives of employees

The New York Times recently published an article on workplace wellbeing based on a study, widely circulated from Oxford University.

However, if it had attended just one wellbeing event in the last year, it would have come to the same conclusions. The information it presented isn’t new:

Workplace wellbeing initiatives have a limited impact
Organisations should focus on practices such as pay, bonuses and work flexibility
Some stress interventions have actually had a negative effect.

The truth is that a few things can be true at the same time.

There is much more nuance in the practical reality of workplace wellbeing.

1. The responsibility of employers

It is your responsibility to drive the workplace practices. Whether it is diversity, equity and inclusion, pay and reward, benefits, flexibility, manager training, or leadership behaviours – that job rests on your shoulders.

2. Know what you are adopting

It is your responsibility to thoroughly review the wellbeing interventions, supporting systems and benefits before launching them to your employees. You have to know and understand what it is you are trying to get your team onboard with.

3. Fostering engagement

It is also your responsibility to work with partners to drive engagement through regular communications, especially from management and leaders. Fire-and-forget strategies don’t work with new apps and services. You need to be working with providers to drive business-wide adoption and achieve continued engagement.

4. Bringing wellbeing into the boardroom

It is also your responsibility to measure the health of your employees. You must find a way to make this a boardroom priority. And today this shouldn’t be impossible – especially if you are coming at it through an ESG or sustainability angle, which is the business of every single person in that boardroom.

5. The responsibility of wellbeing providers

As a wellbeing provider, it is your responsibility to create a service that is engaging to employees. It is not okay to take a company’s money, sit back, count the profit but let the relationship fall by the wayside due to a lack of engagement. You shouldn’t feel happy with that. It’s your job to continue evolving your product, your service and your offering so that organisations and their employees are getting the very best support.

6. Leave the tech to experts

Stop creating technology or apps for the sake of it, or for revenue ‘diversification’. Partner with, or even acquire great technology, but accept that most of what has been created over the past 10 years is just noise in the market. Trust the specialists to focus on technology.

7. Human touch is everything

SaaS (software as a service) doesn’t work in wellbeing. You need a SwaS (software with a service) model, where humans drive the corporate client through the lens of engagement and data. Leaving a company to it based on an investment model is not acceptable.

8. Data is all-important

If you aren’t measuring results with your clients, and making it easy to report back on engagement and wellbeing outcomes, then what are you doing?

If you are mission-led, you should be measuring the health and wellbeing of employees and business health in tandem. This isn’t just for them to see how their investment is performing, but for you to know that what you are doing is working and having a tangible, positive impact on the lives of others.

Workplace wellbeing is an incredibly complex topic, still relatively in its infancy and we must concede it was accelerated too fast (in market maturity terms) by Covid-19. It also comes with little funding in terms of genuine health prevention.

It will continue this way unless the industry and employers start taking responsibility for delivering outcomes and really work together to develop solutions and services that have a sustainable affect on the lives of employees.

As the study showed, some initiatives can fail or not work for each person, but that is precisely why we have to keep innovating, keep listening and keep collaborating so that, collectively, we can find that sweet spot of employee wellbeing.