Employee wellbeing is an increasingly broad concept, and its importance is growing even more quickly as its definition, as employers marshall resources to meet employee needs.
Understanding and fulfilling employee expectations and needs with respect to wellbeing is vitally important right now, for several reasons.
First and foremost, helping people who are facing mental health challenges resulting from the stress of the pandemic is important to job performance, as well as to employee retention. If organisations want to retain their talent as the job market heats up, ensuring people are supported and engaged is vital. In addition to job performance and retention, wellbeing programs are also being eagerly sought by job seekers, who look to an organisation’s stance on wellbeing as an indicator of the employee experience.
To put it succinctly, employee wellbeing is at the nexus of job performance, employee retention, and talent acquisition – hence, its growing importance.
How to get wellbeing right for your workplace
Determining what “wellbeing” means in your workplace is the first step in developing (or, for that matter, augmenting) your organisation’s wellbeing plan for employees. What makes sense for one organisation may not fit the next.
To help leaders get a sense of the elements comprising employee wellbeing, as well as parsing those that make the most sense for their workplaces, we’ve developed the following guide, “Workplace Wellbeing: A Simple Guidebook for Leaders.”
Within this guide, you’ll find a discussion of wellbeing, how the concept is evolving, and new trends of which you’ll want to be aware. In particular, we focus on mental health at work, which has emerged as a key area of need worldwide. Our aim is to help leaders adapt and create more responsive policies that support new employee needs.
Aligning leadership and employee perceptions
In the latter part of the guide, we detail gaps in perception between leaders and employees concerning a variety of factors related to employee wellbeing, including the impact of the pandemic upon individuals and the efficacy of existing wellbeing programmes. This persistent misconception creates a true strategic liability for organisations. For wellbeing initiatives to deliver positive outcomes, leaders first need to ensure their understanding of where employees stand, and how programmes for them are working, is accurate.
To ensure perceptions are clear and aligned, the guide provides leaders with a simple framework we call “AURA” and details the steps they can take to ensure they’re operating from a position of truth.
Download your copy of “Workplace Wellbeing: A Simple Guidebook for Leaders”
