'It's becoming a business-critical imperative to have'
Companies that prioritize employee wellbeing in every aspect of the business not only have a healthy workforce but a healthy bottom line.
Holistically healthy organizations are 2.2 times more likely to surpass their fiscal targets, 2.8 times more able to manage change positively and 3.2 times more adept at maintaining existing talent, finds a new study conducted by the Josh Bersin Company.
“In the last few years, the pandemic, the social unrest, all of those things really, companies have really started to pay attention to caring for their employees, protecting their employees; doing everything they can to make sure their employees are healthy and well,” says Janet Mertens, senior director of research at the Josh Bersin Company in Newmarket Ont.
“A number of companies were going about this simply by adding more benefits to the pile.”
But as the metrics showed, that wasn’t the answer to employee retention, despite all of the money thrown at the problem.
“They’re doing all this work investing so much into having a world-class portfolio of benefits but their employees were still leaving, they were still getting sick, they were still burning out,” she says.
“If the work and the culture of the company aren’t healthy, it almost doesn’t matter whether you have benefits for every aspect of the employee experience, it’s really got to come together. And all of the pieces around culture and ways of working and leadership behaviours and management systems have to enable all of that great investment and all that great effort that’s coming out of the benefits department.”
For one wellness expert, these new results are not surprising.
“Results can be challenging to measure in the space and so when you actually see the research starting to come to fruition, it’s really exciting. This research is very positive to see the link between supporting people but then actually seeing the results that follow,” says Leora Hornstein, health and wellness specialist at Cenovus Energy in Calgary.
Successful wellbeing has to be tied into the organizational fabric, she says. “Healthy organizations apply a lens of health and wellbeing to every corner of the company, it has to be embedded into the company’s vision, into the company’s values, that’s where success comes from.”
Four levels of maturity
The Bersin company came up with a way to categorize organizational wellness stages, via a four-level process, and it examined 91 practices throughout the companies.
Level 1 employers view employees simply offer benefits, whereas the highest level 4 businesses are companies that are miles ahead of their peers and they’re outperforming their peers as a result, says Mertens.
“They are looking at employee health as a combination or an intersection of three things: healthy work, healthy people [and] healthy culture and so this is where, with companies operating at level four, we saw significant activation of senior leadership in the health and wellbeing conversation.”
Fifteen per cent of those firms surveyed are at the highest level, found the research, with a further 57 per cent are at levels one and two.
Seventy-seven per cent of firms reported they are prioritizing the safety of workers; 75 per cent had a focus on wellbeing; and 70 per cent reported clear communications strategies on these efforts.
But what categorizes a strong organization in terms of its overall wellness?
“A holistically healthy organization means a company’s positive work culture and a positive work environment supports the staff’s overall and holistic wellbeing, and that works cyclically to support an individual worker’s performance, a team’s performance and the organization’s performance to allow for optimal business results,” says Hornstein.
For those types of employers, the benefits manifest at the employee level, she says. “It allows people to show up as their best selves, to show up as their whole selves and that means that an organization recognizes that their workers are human and it’s the human that allows for the best business results.”
This development was a direct result of the pandemic, says Mertens.
“Wellbeing has really been catapulted out of the benefits back room and into the boardroom. Not in my recent memory can I think of CEOs paying attention to things like employee wellbeing, employee health. And deskbound companies like tech and financial services have never paid attention to that before, and psychological safety has become hugely important.”
‘Business-critical’ approach to wellness
Many employers are seeing a wellness strategy no longer as a “nice to have,” says Hornstein but “it’s becoming a business-critical imperative to have.”
“Results will come when senior leadership understands and embraces and lives the concepts and elements of holistic wellbeing more so than just a checkbox activity. Because to see the results that it brings, it needs to be more than just the offering of a program or the offering of a service or something that’s thought about once a year; it needs to be built into every element and every aspect throughout all levels, throughout all programs, and it needs to be thought about in a way that supports how and what decisions are made, versus just what it’s offered.”
And this journey should ideally be driven by HR, says Mertens.
“This is not just, ‘Hey, let’s do employee wellbeing because it shows better people metrics’; this is tied to financial performance and customer satisfaction and innovation. This is a real opportunity for this conversation to elevate beyond HR because it’s not just HR’s job to own health and wellbeing.”
Many companies are not offering exactly what employees need, found another survey, and levels of burnout continues to rise, according to another study.
