Working from home or working alone? – Activate a healthier culture by supporting employee well-being
Much has shifted during the past few years. Hybrid and remote working have gone from unique to mainstream. People have been asked to do more and respond in unexpected ways to meet new community and customer needs. Time together as a team connecting has reduced, and a sense of greater purpose for the organisation may have been forgotten in the day-to-day operations.
In Microsoft’s most recent Work Trend Index, a global survey across several industries and organisations, 85% of leaders say that the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive. The absence of the traditional visual cues of ‘seeing’ people actively working while passing by their desk, poses a challenge for many team leaders. At the same time, 48% of employees report that they’re already burned out at work. As the Microsoft report emphasises that this heightened concern about productivity has the potential to make hybrid work unsustainable.
Burnout is increasing significantly, and mental health is now a board-level discussion, with anxiety and depression at levels not previously seen. There are emerging signs of low performance, dissatisfaction, lower motivation levels, and not feeling valued.
For the past decade, the focus has been on staff engagement, when seeking to improve the experience of work. Yet the pandemic has shown us that this is not enough. Healthy organisations need a reservoir of resilience, not just engagement.
Psychological well-being has an additional effect on staff engagement: it can drive productivity. Compared to engagement alone, well-being is twice as strongly related to positive business outcomes (Robertson & Cooper, 2011).
To create a healthy culture, organisations now need an integrated approach where people wellbeing and engagement are strategically viewed hand-in-hand. Leaders need to take targeted action to foster wellbeing-led people experience, where we have more good days at work.
From our experience, by taking the following actions, organisations can achieve better workplace well-being and activate a healthier culture:
- Connect wellbeing to people engagement. People engagement and well-being are distinct but interconnected. Together they support resilience and psychological safety. It is only by understanding the combination of the two that we can target interventions that truly shift the dial and improve people’s experience and drive productivity.
- Take both an individual and systemic approach. Target specific individual and team needs to enhance personal resilience and psychological safety by continuously reinforcing psychological well-being, physical well-being, and a sense of belonging. Alongside this, organisations need to make systemic changes to drive deeper and sustained workplace well-being.
- Sustain results by developing a People Experience Strategy. Avoid jumping straight to ready-made solutions based on conventional hypotheses. Achieve greater impact by conducting an evidence-based diagnosis to help you define and develop the future People Experience Strategy with a practical roadmap to support the implementation.
- Develop employee and team resilience. Alongside the strategy and roadmap, it is also important that employees develop the skills to build their personal resilience and understand what they can do to support their team’s well-being and engagement. Equip leaders with knowledge and skills to improve team well-being. Coach teams to create better ways of working together and develop self-learning modules and tools to support staff well-being on a day-to-day basis.
We are all about organisational health, which separates good organisations from the great. Whether our clients are at the top of their game (and want to remain there) or are in ‘turnaround’ mode, we all need to work on our organisational health.
Whatever the situation, be it a strategic conundrum, a market opportunity, or an operational gripe, we combine the art and science of organisational health to help our clients improve and excel.
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