Health and wealth: why workplace wellbeing makes a difference to the bottom line
Staff are increasingly mentally and physically wrung out. So what can employers do to create happier, healthier teams that are more engaged?
Contributor
Caitlin Sykes
As the calendar flips to the last page of the year, many conversations turn to holidays and the need for some respite from the grind and pressures of work.
But feeling stressed and burnt out isn’t just an end-of-year phenomenon, with employees increasingly reporting work has ongoing negative impacts on their physical and mental health.
The 2022 Workplace Wellbeing Survey, carried out over May and June this year by the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) and nib health insurance, canvassed 1,205 workers in a range of industries, roles and organisation sizes.
It found a massive 91 percent had experienced negative physical effects as a result of work – including fatigue, headaches and problems sleeping – at least once in the last three months.
Negative emotional impacts – such as irritability, anxiety and excessive worrying – were experienced at least once over the same timeframe by 87 percent of workers.
Ian Sargeant, national manager group, partnerships and strategy at health insurer nib, says those negative impacts are real and growing, as businesses find themselves under increasing pressure to cut costs and reduce headcounts.
“The pressures in most organisations, now almost a year on from when we did this research, are not abating. And globally a lot of organisations are now probably more nervous about their outlook than they were a year ago.”
Understaffing was identified as having the biggest impact on workplace wellness, with 63 percent saying not having enough staff negatively impacted their wellbeing. Sargeant also says the rise of ‘always on’ work culture, exacerbated by remote and hybrid working through the pandemic and beyond, is another factor driving poor workplace wellbeing.
However, the survey also found that 65 percent of those likely to stay in their job worked for organisations that were proactive when it came to wellbeing.
“There were findings around the propensity for people to work at an organisation that was proactive in its approach to wellbeing,” he says. “And the fact that eight out of 10 employers surveyed said they were going to be spending more on wellbeing initiatives in the next 12 months than they had in the previous 12 shows increasing awareness of the importance of being able to provide these wellness initiatives for employees.”
Show you care
What are some of the things workplaces should be doing to help their staff stay well?
Initiatives exist on a continuum, Sargeant says, spanning from a fruit bowl in the lunchroom to comprehensive corporate wellness programmes. The variety of things workplaces can do are as diverse as workplaces themselves – but they need an underpinning factor.
“It’s about showing your people that you care. If an employee can come into work and leave work feeling that their needs are understood and that their employer genuinely cares for them, then that's what promotes employee engagement, that's what promotes retention, that's what promotes higher productivity. It's simple stuff: people just need to be listened to and feel that they're understood.”
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Simple actions done well can make a tangible, positive impact on employee engagement, but workplaces need to take a deliberate, planned approach. And while it’s important a CEO models a culture that fosters positive wellbeing, team leaders – those tasked with operationalising strategy and managing staff day to day – play a crucial role.
“It’s simple stuff like giving regular feedback on how people are doing, having the conversations around what they want from their role, what they're interested in doing next, what their career path looks like. That's basic management philosophy that's been around for decades, but I think we’ve risked losing sight of it as we return to whatever the new normal is post-Covid.”
Making wellbeing part of BAU
‘Normalising’ wellbeing is both the mission and a way of working at startup Groov, co-founded by mental health advocate Sir John Kirwan. Its platform integrates into employees’ workflows, consuming data they explicitly and implicitly share to deliver personalised, science-backed interventions that help them feel and function better.
Groov CEO Matt Krogstad gives the example of how the platform might pick up that a call-centre worker has just taken 10 calls in a row, and subsequently serves up an intervention through Slack or Teams that will help them recharge. The more an employee engages with the platform, the better it understands their work habits and patterns (and deviations from these) as well as effective interventions to enhance their performance, engagement and wellbeing.
Around 80 employers currently use Groov across New Zealand, Australia and the UK, with customers including Kiwibank, Cisco and Fletcher Building. As a startup Groov “dogfoods the platform” with good results, says Krogstad, but he thinks there’s room for more smaller companies to take a proactive approach to promoting wellbeing.
“Some startups make the mistake of, ‘oh, we'll focus on culture, or we'll focus on wellbeing once we raise Series A, or once we get to Series B, or we crack $1 million in revenue, but the time to do it is when it's just the founder or founders.”
“It sets the tone and people learn by example. So when I talk to the team about the fact that I recharged or, ‘hey, I worked out this morning, I took care of myself, I feel amazing’ it not only gives them permission, but it makes it normal.”
Five ways to wellbeing
Like Sargeant and Krogstad, Mental Health Foundation chief executive Shaun Robinson describes a direct link between employee wellbeing, engagement and performance.
“If your staff are in a good space mentally and emotionally, then they are going to be in a better space in every aspect of their lives, including their work. There's a lot of evidence to show that promoting wellbeing in a workplace improves engagement, decreases absenteeism, decreases presenteeism… and it has big positive impacts for their relationships – internal relationships, but also customer relationships – and for productivity.”
The Mental Health Foundation outlines five areas that can promote wellbeing in its Five ways to Wellbeing resource. Research shows a key characteristic of those with dangerously low wellbeing is they have no behaviours associated with the five ways built into their lifestyle, notes Robinson. Alternately, adopting behaviours associated with just one of the ways increases a person’s likelihood of having positive wellbeing by 48 percent.
“We ask the question, ‘what does a really good day look like for you?’ Write down the things that would happen in a day where you go home thinking, ‘I had a really good day’ and you will probably find that many of the five ways to wellbeing were featured in them. Many workplaces are already doing a lot of this; it’s about recognising it and being more systematic about it and really proactively building it into the culture.”
Here are Robinson’s tips for integrating the Five Ways of Wellbeing into working life:
- Connect: Workplaces are one of the key places where we connect with others even if we’re working remotely, says Robinson, so foster ways for employees to build positive relationships with each other. “It's also about connecting with community, because evidence is that human beings need deep relationships…but we also need a sense of belonging to a bigger community, or a sense of tribe.”
- Give: Giving isn’t just about giving money; fostering ways for people to help their workmates, for example, can positively contribute to their wellbeing.
- Keep learning: Workplaces are ideal for offering people an opportunity to keep learning through their job and career development, but employers can also promote inquisitiveness and open-mindedness by offering opportunities for staff to share what their passions are outside of work – like a book club or another hobby.
- Notice: “The human brain is a fantastic thing because it can remember the past and it can project those thoughts about the past into the future as a way to think about how the past might be relevant to the future,” says Robinson. “However, we need to rest from that because when that gets out of control, that becomes depression and anxiety.” Offering meditation or yoga classes, or simply encouraging teams to share the things they're grateful for (at work and in their wider lives) helps cultivate a culture of taking notice.
- Move: “There's an absolute correlation between physical activity and mental activity or wellness. It doesn't necessarily mean being an athlete, but moving your body on a regular basis is incredibly good for your mental health as well as your physical health.” At the Mental Health Foundation, for example, the team takes a weekly walk up Auckland’s Mount Eden, it facilitates yoga classes and organises the workspace to encourage incidental movement.
Wellbeing is one of the key aspects covered in Best Places to Work – a programme Caffeine is supporting as its media partner for the startup community. The Best Places to Work employee engagement survey is now open.
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