HR Executive Coaching: Selling Wellbeing to CEOs

Turning Adversity Into Opportunity

CEOs are continually distracted by urgent priorities. This explains why, even before Covid-19, CEOs tended to see employee wellbeing as “nice to do,” but not a top strategic concern for achieving strategic business objectives.

Today, everything has changed. 

Covid-19 is pushing employees to the breaking point, resulting in dangerously low levels of employee wellbeing. Companies risk losing their most valued employees, seeing higher operating costs, and becoming less competitive.

Companies must address employees’ financial and mental health before it devastates profits and performance and adversely impacts your company’s current and future bottom line.

Employer reputations are at stake. What companies do (or don’t do) now matters. 

Forrester Research predicts that after the crisis, job seekers will ask: “How did you, as an employer, handle the coronavirus pandemic?” And candidates will study employer review websites like Glassdoor to assess how employers did. 

You will be judged for years on how you treated your employees during these times. Companies have to prepare to answer these questions: 

How did your leaders ensure the wellbeing of employees and their families? 

How did they take care of employees, in the short term and long term?

How you answer these questions will determine the engagement, loyalty, and morale of your current workforce, and will affect post-crisis recruiting and retention. It will become part of your corporate reputation.

HR must partner with CEOs to address these new pandemic realities. Employees, consumers, and shareholders are paying attention to how companies treat their workforces, and HR must lead the way.

HR Leaders As Trusted Advisors

For this to happen, HR needs a seat at the leadership table. Low employee wellbeing is now an existential issue for all companies. CEOs can no longer make core decisions without considering the wellbeing of their workforces. 

HR must get needed resources to maximize human capital. It starts by getting CEOs to see “workforce issues” as top strategic priorities. 

“CEOs across the globe…would like to use their chief human resource officers (CHROs) the way they use their CFOs–as sounding boards and trusted partners–But it’s a rare CHRO who can serve in such an active role.” 

Ram Charam, It’s Time to Split HR, Harvard Business Review, July 2014

The solution? HR must become a trusted strategic advisor to CEOs so that it helps set priorities and allocate resources. Only then can HR persuade CEOs to allocate needed funding, resources, and leadership support.

As a strategic advisor, you’ll work with CEOs to make employee wellbeing a top strategic priority. This will cultivate loyal, healthy, and enthusiastic employees who love where they work and who will drive the company’s priorities. 

This will ensure your company emerges stronger after the Covid crisis and gains competitive advantage by reducing turnover, attracting talent, increasing engagement, and improving customer service.

Your company will earn a reputation as a great place to work, in good times and in bad. You’ll demonstrate employer social responsibility which helps attract talent, earn customer loyalty, and boost share value. 

If you are an HR professional ready to take your company and career to this next level, you need to ask yourself these questions:

• Is your employee wellbeing program all that it could be?
• Are you a valued member of your company’s Executive Leadership Team?
• Do you help set top strategic priorities at your company?
• Are employee engagement and morale driving company success?
• Have you persuaded your CEO to support and fund employee wellbeing?

If you can’t answer these questions with an unequivocal “yes,” our HR Executive Coaching Program (ECP) will help you succeed. 

The ECP will help you reach and persuade your CEO (or whoever you have to persuade) that employee wellbeing is a mission-critical strategic priority, and obtain the funding, resources, and leadership support needed for success.

“The people who lead today’s organizations need to be more than just a financial genius or a sales and marketing guru. They need to be someone who gets how to run a business with their people and because of their people, rather than at the expense of people.”

Gallup: Why HR Leaders Never Become the CEO, but Should

You became an HR executive because you care about people. Unlike some in leadership positions, you understand why (and how) nurturing employees is key to business success, and the right thing to do. 

HR’s voice must be heard and heeded by CEOs. Yet, too often, it isn’t. 

This is why you need to be more than a “human resources leader.” You must be a business leader with human resources expertise.

We can help you learn skills to become a trusted advisor to your CEO. In that way, you help set the agendas, resolve conflicting priorities, and get needed resources to make employee wellbeing a cornerstone of business success.

How It Works

The Returns On Wellbeing Institute’s ECP is a focused and individualized program tailored to your particular needs. It’s also designed to help you respond to today’s challenges facing your company. 

Most importantly, we help you focus on quick wins and measurable outcomes.

Today, HR does not have the luxury to take a year or more for coaching. We’ve designed this program to quickly get what you need, for your company and your career, to achieve greater effectiveness and influence while becoming your CEO’s trusted advisor. 

Our intensive 45-day program follows these steps:

Assessment: We help you assess your current workplace environment and capabilities. This includes your personal history, education, training, and professional experience. We help you identify strengths and challenges.

Goal-setting: We help you identify goals you want to accomplish. We then help you develop a strategic wellbeing action plan into a compelling vision. The what, how, and with whom, to obtain the resources to succeed.

Knowing the CEO: To successfully influence the CEO, you must know his/her top business objectives. We show you how to understand your CEO’s thinking and priorities. You’ll know what keeps the CEO up at night and how to understand their strategic plan, inside and out.

Reaching and influencing the CEO: As a former CEO, Jim Purcell knows what drives CEO thinking and how to get CEOs’ attention. He helps you have the best chance of success in convincing and selling your vision to your CEO.

Presenting to CEOs and the C Suites. We teach you how to persuasively and inspirationally influence your CEO using data. You’ll learn what you should know, news and information to stay on top of, and how to leverage memberships in outside organizations to build your network and develop your “brand.”

Advancing Your Career: We help you move beyond influencing to taking on additional responsibility and moving from tactical to strategic. As a strategic advisor to leadership, you’ll position yourself for new career opportunities.

Your Coach:

All consultations will be one-on-one with Jim Purcell. Jim will draw from his years of experience as a CEO and years of working with HR professionals to help you create a bridge between HR and the C Suite.

If you are an HR executive ready to take your company and career to the next level, enroll for a free 20-minute consultation below.