5 ingredients to an impactful wellbeing strategy
Employee wellbeing is much more than workplace wellness and fitness programs -- it's an approach that addresses employee needs across the full spectrum of wellbeing.
Some business leaders might assume that offering a robust physical and mental wellness program is the key to unlocking a successful employee wellbeing strategy. However, during my time leading wellbeing and health promotion strategy at IBM, Hess Corporation and other Fortune 500 companies, I found that there are many crucial ingredients to developing and executing a wellbeing strategy that has a demonstrable impact across the enterprise.
Employee wellbeing is much more than workplace wellness and fitness programs. The ultimate goal of an impactful wellbeing strategy is to develop an integrated approach that addresses the needs of employees across the full spectrum of wellbeing and equips the workforce with the skills of resilience.
Here are five considerations that will help ensure a successful and sustainable workforce resilience and wellbeing strategy:
- Every company is at a different place in the evolution and maturity of their efforts – Employers are starting at different places and have unique goals; Whether it be addressing mental health stigma, creating a psychologically safe workplace environment, demonstrating cost and productively savings, or using resilience training to combat burnout, ignite creativity and team engagement, for example. For multinationals, this may vary at different countries within the company. It is important to consider the cultural needs and meet the employees where there are.
- Leadership commitment and involvement is an imperative – Stakeholder support is critical for sustained success around any HR initiative, especially when it comes to workforce wellbeing. Visible senior executive sponsorship from business leaders is crucial in addressing stigma and signals company commitment toward workforce resilience and wellbeing as a talent, benefits and ultimately a business imperative. But we must empower champions (executive and grassroots) with the personal tools and leadership skills to succeed in this role. Many wellbeing programs miss this key element, don’t deliver and can’t resonate with them personally. As a result, leaders are not able to confidently serve as role models or spokespeople.
- We must invest in primary preparedness – Many employers focus exclusively on EAP and behavioral health networks as the central components of their mental health strategy. However, these programs are not strategic levers to proactively build skills that prepare people in times of stress, transformation and change. While they can play a critical role, they are primarily resources available in a time of clinical need. In my experience and in conversations with Benefits Design peers over the years, there is an acknowledgement that these services are insufficient at creating psychological safety in the workforce, breaking stigmas and ensuring the workforce is mentally prepared (resilient) to take on the challenges in an ever complex world.
- Measure what matters – Employers should look under the hood, inquire about whether a workforce wellbeing solution is evidence-based, if it has proven efficacy, and can measure the outcomes that matter to the company (these may be impact on healthcare trend, health status, attraction, reduction in risk for burnout, turnover, absence, engagement, NPS, etc.) Wellbeing vendor portal traffic alone does not equate to real behavior change, improvements in health, nor impact to productivity or the bottom line.
- Effective communication is vital – It’s important to leverage internal mechanisms and vendor marketing/communications to cut through the cacophony. Wellbeing resources sometimes get buried in annual enrollment materials seen once a year or are inadvertently hidden under an “Aggregator” or wellbeing hub. So, you have to be careful on how you use these, because some are terrific and others just offer vaporware. Understand the challenges of consequence to your workforce and focus on these critical themes. At IBM, we identified mental health, cardio, and musculoskeletal as key themes and were able to put on spotlight on these, raise awareness and impact workforce wellbeing for participants.
To support employee wellbeing and help their workforces thrive in the face of uncertainty, leaders must ensure coherent messaging from HR to employees, and seek to solve the issues of right now but also look ahead to the future. As leaders, we must ask ourselves if our organization’s leadership is able to lead with empathy, model resilience during times of uncertainty, and if we are able to recognize employee needs before they become a crisis. Do our employees feel psychologically safe and are they individually resilient/? These skills are not always inherent but can absolutely be acquired. They are also critical to the wellbeing of our people and ultimately the success of our organizations.
