Professor Sir Cary Cooper, ALLIANCE Manchester Business School, University of Manchester outlines what good looks like for organisations.
There are many bottom-line issues that are driving organisations and HR professionals to develop strategies for enhancing employee health and wellbeing. First, the massive costs of stress-related ill health. The recent Labour Force Survey found that work-related stress, depression and anxiety amounts to 17.0m lost working days, with just under 1m workers suffering from these conditions. According to the Health & Safety Executive’s most recent Sickness Absence Report in 2022 found that “stress, depression and anxiety accounted for 51% of all work-related ill health cases and 55% of all working days lost due to work-related ill health”. Second, the costs to organisations of people leaving their employer due to the poor quality of the workplace culture. As one HR Director phrased it to me ‘regrettable turnover’, that is, the loss of talented people and the organisation’s inability to attract new talent due to their poor employer brand. These two main drivers, and others as well, are motivating employers to engage in strategic employee wellbeing, to change their culture and employee brand in the marketplace.
Low hanging fruit
There seems to be two different types of approaches to employee health and wellbeing. First, the ‘low hanging fruit’ approach, which puts on wellbeing days, mindfulness at lunchtime, wellbeing champions, mental health first aid, etc. This approach, although to some extent helpful as a first stage, is not really a strategic approach. It is ‘the low cost’ approach to wellbeing, which does not change the culture of the organisation. The recent HR Grapevine survey of over 300 senior HR professionals found said that only 35% of their senior leaders had ‘bought in to strategic wellbeing’, only 40% even had good workforce data or metrics on employee health wellbeing and 80% said their wellbeing budgets have been frozen or decreased.
So, what does ‘Good Work’ look like, what should organisations do to create a wellbeing culture from a strategic perspective? First, HR needs to develop wellbeing metrics, so that the organisation can assess the effectiveness of their strategy, that is, so that the Board and the senior leadership team can measure both positive and negative movements in employee health and productivity. The metrics should include both qualitative and quantitative indicators. The more objective measures might include stress-related ill health absence, labour turnover, lost productive value, etc. The more subjective measures might be job satisfaction levels, presenteeism, line manager behaviour, commitment, communications, etc.
Wellbeing at the Boardroom
Second, organisations need to make employee health and wellbeing a Boardroom issue, by ensuring that employee health and wellbeing is part of a particular Board member’s responsibly or that a new NED is appointed to this role. That person would then be responsible for highlighting the wellbeing metrics to the Board on a quarterly or half yearly basis.
Third, a senior HR professional ought to be appointed to the role of Director of Health and Wellbeing reporting to the HRD, as someone who develops the organisation’s strategy, reporting regularly to the SLT and ultimately through the HRD to the Board, based on a continual review of the metrics. In addition, this role should carry out regular wellbeing audits to gauge employees’ views of their workplace, that is, how they are managed, the hours they work, their workloads, development/training, etc. And where this Director finds problems, she/he would develop appropriate interventions to address the issues, for example, regarding a bullying management style or a long working hours culture, which is damaging employees’ health. There also needs to be a budget set aside for this role within the HR budget!
Even John Ruskin, the great social reformer of the 19th Century, highlighted the importance of looking after employees at the start of the Industrial Revolution when he said:
“In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: they must be fit for it, they must not do too much of it, and they must have a sense of success in it.”
