Worried about the wellbeing of your employees? It’s time to become proactive and personal

Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends 2023 identified “Prioritising Human Outcomes” as the strategy to design for impact. It calls for the need to elevate the focus on human risk and advancing the human element of sustainability. The research also showed our poor readiness in this regard. Only 19% respondents believe their organisations are very ready to address the human risks when making workforce decisions.

One of the most critical elements of human sustainability and human risk is employee wellbeing. We are clearly past the stage where we are still debating the benefits of prioritising employee wellbeing for not justlong-term business viability, but more importantly because it’s the right thing to do. The pandemic and the post-pandemic era of settling into the new normal triggered a lot of organisations to invest significantly in wellbeing, but we are still far from where we should be or would like to be.

There are a few challenges with our current approach to wellbeing initiatives:

• There is no preemptive approach to identifying wellbeing issues within employees.
• There is a one-size-fits-all approach with most organisations rolling out wellbeing initiatives without understanding the different needs of different employees.
• There is no formal mechanism to understand if the wellbeing initiatives are creating the desired impact.

Predict
Being able to identify signs and patterns that would lead to deterioration in an employee’s health would be extremely powerful but is rarely done. One could counter that as it is a tall ask to predict wellbeing (unlike attrition where prediction models are common), we do not necessarily get the trigger that something has happened. Most employees will never talk about their health concerns and even if they do, we hardly have any mechanism to track it and trace this journey back to understanding what led to it.

However, it’s worth giving it a try because even if we can achieve some success, it’s better than not doing anything about it. The trick is in being
able to identify red flags based on certain hypothesis.

High workload is a natural trigger and there are multiple ways you can derive insights into whether employees are overworked. While surveys are one possibility, there are also a bunch of indirect sources of data. For instance, the travel history of your employees – an employee travelling too often (clubbed with his family details like sick parents or small children at home) can be a trigger; or communication and collaboration data (through Office 365 and other collaboration tools). If an employee has higher than average activity levels or has high email flow during weekends and off-work hours, there is a clear red flag.

Datasets like HR Information Systems (employee demographics, workforce movements, acquisitions, attrition), leave plans, and workforce demand data, can also help in identifying the sections of the workforce that are overburdened. For instance, robust demand-supply planning data can help identify areas of more demand than supply and hence chances of employees picking up additional work.

Personalise
There is a lot of power in personalising wellbeing initiatives as wellbeing not only means different things to different people, but also different things depending on nuances of generation, family situations, life stage, and more.

Personalisation doesn’t imply that you need an individual wellbeing plan for every employee. It can be driven through the design of persona-based wellness package preferences. Rather than providing all benefits to everyone, classifying employees into personas and providing them with fit-for-purpose interventions will be more useful. The other approach is to leave it completely in the hands of the employees. They have the flexibility to determine what wellbeing means to them and how the organisation can enable it. This would require the organisation to build an ecosystem that enables this flexibility – from agile working processes to open-minded supervisors.

Measure for impact
We have seen a huge rise in investment in wellness programmes, but not necessarily in the measurement of the return on these programmes –were we able to positively influence the wellbeing of our people?

Going back to where we started – the need to focus on wellbeing is driven by the need to reduce human risk and improve human sustainability, along with helping an organisation’s long-term business viability. These are precisely the parameters through which we should be able to measure the returns of our wellbeing initiatives.

• One part of measuring wellbeing is the impact of the traditional ways we supported our people – providing them opportunities to engage in wellbeing activities like yoga, meditation sessions, gym memberships, etc. It will be extremely useful to understand the uptake and impact of these initiatives to truly improve the wellbeing of our employees
• The other, and the more important part, is measuring how work practices impact wellbeing.

Different organisations have taken different approaches towards it. While some have created metrics like ‘happiness scores’, others have used metrics like a reduction in insurance claims due to sickness or a reduction in sick days as a proxy to understand if the overall health of their employees is improving.

Being truly concerned about the wellbeing of your employees and doing something (anything at all!) to positively impact it is what every leader should aspire to do. It is high time we translate intent into action that creates real impact. Wellbeing is a complicated space and a tall ask, but taking a step in the right direction is all we need to get to a happy and healthy future for all!

The original article was published in ET HR World on 21^st May 2023