Workplace well-being is a key component of any organization's success. As a well-being leader, it is essential to help your organization prioritize employee well-being by helping your colleagues understand how it can positively impact productivity, staff retention, and general job happiness.
In this post, we'll follow up on some of the takeaways from our workplace well-being panel this month. Looking at some implementation tips, and key takeaways from one of our speakers on workplace well-being strategies for 2023.
1. The Challenges Of Employee Well-being As a Leader
“Never assume what works for one always works for others - "Empathy" is one of the leadership skills required in a diverse, multicultural workplace. As people define well-being and priorities differently, leaders are required to flex their communication styles and approaches to first better understand people's motivations and own challenges.
Without understanding that, it will be more difficult to come up with effective strategies that could work with the majority/in the short term - than address the minority/long-term challenges in the way you believe is sustainable.
Building a healthy and well-performing team is not a one-day job, but as a leader, it is important to come in open-minded and enjoy the process.” — Kana Maniwa (C.O.O, Bloomberg, London).
2. Key Element/Approach of a Good Strategy.
The following essential components can help shape your well-being strategy for the workplace:
Creating a Culture of Well-Being: By incorporating well-being into the organization's values and mission, leaders should work to foster a culture of well-being.
Employee involvement in well-being projects should be encouraged through regular communication, feedback, and participation.
Resources and Tools: Offering employees access to resources and tools that promote their well-being can include flexible work schedules, opportunities for physical activity, and access to mental health support.
Measurements and Evaluation: Setting metrics and gauging the success of well-being projects can assist leaders in pinpointing areas that need improvement and guiding their decisions with data.
Kana Maniwa wrote ”Be pragmatic when creating a strategy - use the most recent dataset both quantitative and qualitative (even though quantitative data of employee wellbeing is very difficult to get), have a practical guideline on how to handle certain situations, and make sure to have enough feedback channels during the implementation phase to allow constructive feedback to be sent through.
For example, an aspect of employee well-being strategy includes cultural inclusivity at the workplace. Let's say some of your team members are practicing Ramadan leading up to Eid, and informing the rest of the team to "be mindful about eating lunch at your desk" isn't good enough. They need to communicate why and how they should respect and support their employees' cultural practices.
Practically, if people aren't suggested to eat lunch at their desks - do we have alternative areas that both parties could utilize (rather than asking them to step out of the office all the time)?
3. Why Employees Struggle to Engage with Workplace Well-being Initiatives
"Most workplace wellbeing initiatives aren't always preventive/preemptive in application and communication, meaning employees don't often spend time going through company benefits or HR libraries until they are in the need of support. Even recently, I didn't know what kind of cancer screening support was in place through the Employee Support team at work - I found out because I was speaking with my colleague who used the service recently. The vast amount of information available on such "Employee Benefit & Information Sharing Page" is not often digestible, and people don't spend enough time reviewing it. This also is a wider conversation for companies to have when it comes to being more creative and increasing awareness.
- Is there any internal activation event we could do to increase awareness for new guidelines being released?
- Are we being considerate enough in communication and arrangement of that - small things we could do like doing something related to their dependents/children's benefits, doing this event first thing in the morning or last thing on the day makes no sense as those most eligible employees might be on duty for school pick-ups.
I strongly think many things help eliminate the first struggle around information accessibility - without solving this, we won't make further progress with employee engagement. - Kana Maniwa (C.O.O, Bloomberg, London).
Workplace well-being strategy should engage employees and leaders across your organization.
This can include helping leaders nurture a well-being culture, engaging employees in well-being initiatives, making accessible the resources and tools that you offer, and assessing the effectiveness of initiatives.
Leaders can create a workplace culture that supports employee well-being and ultimately leads to increased productivity and job satisfaction by understanding the challenges of employee well-being, implementing key elements of a good strategy, and addressing reasons why employees struggle to engage.
Join us at our next meetup, a workshop to help put together a view of what your strategy might look like.