How to make wellbeing good for employees and good for business
Employers are reimagining their cultures to focus on people and the planet to attract, engage and retain top talent.
The 7th annual REBA Employee Wellbeing Research 2022, together with AXA Health, outlines how wellbeing has become the central plank that has enabled organisations to cope and adapt over the past two years. The research shows that wellbeing will continue to be a key priority in creating the right culture, achieving business growth and meeting corporate purpose goals over the coming two years.
The world of work is still in a state of flux, as organisations grapple with changing societal demands, feel the pressure to meet environmental targets and face challenges trying to develop new digital products and services. Of course, all of this is while trying to recruit for missing skills and stave off economic challenges, such as rising inflation and wage pressures.
Get it wrong, and the long hours, stress and burnout will damage the very people organisations rely on to succeed. Get it right, and good job design can create work that is good for the wellbeing of all people.
A positive workplace culture
Work that is fulfilling, allowing you autonomy and letting you create social connections is hugely positive. We found that most employers want to use wellbeing to create a positive work culture. By focusing on the welfare of staff, by establishing a corporate purpose that combines good governance of the workforce with care of the environment and community, organisations can create cultures where employees thrive even during times – or perhaps especially during times – of huge growth and transformation.
This is perhaps why our research found a growing awareness of principles such as environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets, sustainability for the future and the need to become more purposeful as a business. These shifts in outlook are an important context to how employers use wellbeing to retain, recruit and engage staff. It informs the changes that are bubbling up across sectors.
Not uniformly, not in the same order, nor to the same timeline, but are influencing thinking around wellbeing none the less.
Diversity brings broader benefits
This can be seen clearly in the rising focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) – driven by the need to recruit and retain employees from a wider spectrum of our society, to tap into newly emerging skills and benefit from diverse ways of thinking. DEI has emerged as such a vital driver of wellbeing in our 2022 research, whether still largely focused on a balanced gender representation within the workforce, or going further (which we must) to tap into the rich resources of our communities across different races, ethnicities, religions, genders, ages and abilities/disabilities.
Our research suggests that there will be a significant future shift to focus on neurodiversities in particular, at work. We will watch this trend with interest.
To manage this expanded view of the workforce, our research shows that employers are going to be using more personalisation and more data to understand their employees’ wellbeing needs and drivers. In a world where work is constantly changing, those managing employee wellbeing are having to stretch further to gather and analyse data on broader societal wellbeing predictions, their business’s current and future needs, as well as their own workforce needs. REBA’s survey data shows that employers are beefing up their resources (both human and data) to meet this challenge. But it is striking that the data gap between those employers with a sophisticated, integrated wellbeing strategy and those with a disparate offering is wide.
Employee wellbeing has come of age and has grown up into a mainstream business imperative. It is changing how we work for the better and improving working lives.
