When it comes to well-being within organizations, most senior leaders agree in principle that it’s a good concept to pursue.
But often, that is where the consensus ends and differences of opinion begin. For some, well-being equals perks such as fitness programs or on-demand support from professional psychologists. For others, it is a more holistic approach — a program that is embedded in the daily processes of employees.
But no matter how you view well-being within your organization, you may face challenges around what a measurable, effective, and scalable strategy around well-being looks like, where the responsibility should sit to drive it, and how to implement such a strategy. And even if you are confident in your current approach, you may be on the lookout for ways to fine-tune, update, or scale it, particularly if you face any ongoing issues with HR KPIs such as employee engagement and retention.
With this in mind, we spoke to a range of experts, including academics, consultants, and in-house well-being program managers, and looked at our own platform data, to uncover insights regarding:
With these insights, we have created a new ebook: Empowered Teams, Empowered Business: Making Well-Being a Strategic Priority. This can be downloaded at the link below, but in the meantime, here is a preview of what we found.
1. Workplace well-being focuses on reactive interventions, not proactive prevention.
Organizations often focus on responding to the symptoms of poor employee well-being without tackling its root causes.
2. Company well-being initiatives focus on individual action.
This approach often fails, because it means that employees alone bear the responsibility for managing their own well-being, but neither employees nor organizations have the ability to influence or control the systemic factors that contribute to poor well-being in the first place.
Well-being is often ideologically a priority, but rarely a strategic one in the same way revenue and profit are.
Further, a key finding was that teams are good for organizational well-being. In a team-based approach, organizations create the environment for teams to communicate and connect on their own well-being. They foster psychological safety, so that individuals can bring their full selves to work. And most importantly, they enable teams with the data and processes to build, design, and continuously adjust their work environment and well-being needs in a way that drives optimal performance.
And finally, our experts provided us with insights on exactly how to approach well-being from an organizational level, that is effective both for teams and in terms of connecting with business objectives.
From a business objectives perspective, these include how to integrate well-being into your core business strategy, and measure and track progress. And from a team perspective, the insights include how to empower leaders and managers to own processes around team well-being, and how to scale ownership across the organization.
Organizations with employees who agree with the statement “My employer cares about my well-being” have better employee retention, lower rate of absenteeism and burnout, and stronger employee advocacy. And data from the Quan platform shows that teams see an average improvement of 25% across all well-being dimensions that they report as growth opportunities (such as employee engagement), over a 12-week cycle.
In short, there is a wide range of data to support the business case for well-being across the organization, but it starts with measuring.
Download now: Empowered Teams, Empowered Business: Making Well-Being a Strategic Priority
If you’d like to learn more about why a team approach to well-being may be valuable, and how it could fit into your business strategy, you can download the full ebook below.