According to the 2019 Health and Wellbeing at Work survey “more organisations act on an ad hoc basis than take a strategic approach to wellbeing” and “just a third (32%) have a standalone wellbeing strategy in support of their wider organisation strategy” (CIPD,2019).
A good well-being strategy should address all the key areas necessary to maintain the physical and mental health of your staff. Your strategy can be as large or small as your business can afford, but it must be meaningful to your employees and show that you are listening. It needs to explore management and culture, remuneration, stress management, work-life balance, absence management and return to work, physical and mental health concerns. Your strategy is essentially a framework for preventing and managing issues in all these areas to give your employees the best chance to stay and succeed in their job.
Cary Cooper, CBE and Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health explains that the most compelling motivation for investing in wellbeing is linked to bottom line results but, underneath that, there may be a range of different drivers: a need to reduce sickness absence; improving customer satisfaction scores; increasing productivity; retaining talent and more (Simply Health). Sir Cary highlights that “one of the benefits of investing in wellbeing is that improvements can have an impact in many of these areas simultaneously”. Mindshift strongly believes that there is a moral aspect to improving employees’ wellbeing. If you expect high levels of commitment and effort, you have a duty to develop a culture and environment that supports employee wellbeing. We absolutely support Cary Coopers’ statement that “wellbeing initiatives will be poorly perceived if employees feel they are merely a justification to ask them to work harder; getting the culture right will release discretionary effort without breeding resentment”.
Mindshift can assist with this process by working alongside you to better understand your needs and jointly creating the right strategies and policies and of course, bringing them to life!