Imagine you are a lower-paid employee who’s worked at a company for ten years. You’re a single parent, make less than median wage, and your wages have remained flat over the last decade. You live paycheck to paycheck, struggle with student loans, and can’t afford to save for retirement.
Since Covid-19, your employer scrambled your once predictable work schedule. Now you don’t sleep well and feel like a zombie from mental exhaustion. You’re depressed, but fear of being stigmatized if you talk with the EAP which only pays for 4 counseling sessions a year.
What about your employer’s wellness program? While heavily promoted, it ignores your top challenges and focuses on exercise. Yes, it bothers you that you’re 40 pounds overweight, but going to the gym is a nonstarter because you’re always tired and don’t know how to “work out.”
Today, it’s one year into the pandemic and your mood is negative. Life seems hopeless. You aren’t engaged in much of anything, let alone your job. And while you try to be a good employee despite the circumstances, you’d leave your employer in a heartbeat if something better came along.
Addressing New Workplace Realities
The pandemic has exacerbated existing challenges for millions of workers, especially those struggling with low physical, financial and mental wellbeing. Yet, most employers have not revised their EAPs and wellness programs to meet the urgent needs of millions of employees.
For example, Deloitte’s 2021 Global Human Capital Trends found that “80 percent of organizations [say] worker well-being is important or very important for their success over the next 12–18 months, but only 12 percent…are very ready to address this issue.”
This is negligence, pure and simple.
Conclusive evidence shows that low wellbeing hurts employee health. It contributes to substance abuse, poor mood, depression, and preoccupation with personal finances, all of which hurt workplace performance.
By merely paying lip service to wellbeing, not taking action, and allowing inadequate wellbeing programs to remain, employers risk dragging down employees’ emotional commitment to their organization’s purpose and goals.
In other words, they risk eroding employee engagement when employers don’t give employees what they want and need.
With so many workers struggling in ways that impact their workplace performance, employers owe it to employees (and themselves) to prioritize workplace wellbeing as a core pandemic-related objective.
“The onus is on management to introduce work methods and policies that nurture the emotional connections between employees and their workplaces and motivate them to remain committed to the company for the long-term.” says Deloitte analyst, Ariana Roy Kewalramani.
Whole Person Wellbeing
Management must finally address its own disconnect between its perceptions and the realities of what employees need, and instead create wellbeing initiatives built around employees’ actual wants, needs and everyday challenges.
This starts by going beyond wellness programs that focus disproportionately on physical health and instead build workplace wellbeing around whole-person wellbeing within supportive workplace cultures.
Effective wellbeing initiatives must support all aspects of whole-person health, especially employee financial stress (which impacted over half of Americans even before the pandemic), and mental stress, which the Kaiser Family Foundation found is now four times higher than 2019.
Physical Health
Update low participation exercise programs and instead initiate healthy eating programs, which our recent interview with nutrition expert Dr. David Katz suggests can be more effective in boosting physical wellbeing.
Employers can help employees understand why and how to eat better and make healthy eating a realistic, convenient and appealing default option both inside and outside the workplace. This will move employees out of chronic illness danger zones and toward healthier and more productive lives.
If done correctly, this is the type of program that can see high levels of participation. After all, everyone eats. Unlike exercise programs that require extra time and effort, well-designed healthy eating programs can become far more popular when they support healthy lifestyles rather than idealized body images.
Financial Wellbeing
Employers must address financial stress. The American Psychological Association reports that 70% of Americans list the economy and their work as their main sources of stress.
Financial stress is more than just a personal problem for employees. It leads to poor physical and mental health, and research shows that employee financial stress adversely affects workplace performance and productivity.
Employers must ensure they pay living wages and implement financial wellbeing benefits like emergency loans, employee purchasing programs, and child care assistance that help employees keep more money in their pockets and spend less time stressing about their personal finances on the job.
Mental Wellbeing
Studies show employee mental health is the lynchpin to overall good wellbeing. Unfortunately, a majority of mental illnesses go untreated and undiagnosed, often due to lack of employee education, workplace stigma, and affordable and easy access to mental healthcare.
Employers must update mental health benefits to ensure that employees can address their mental health challenges. They must proactively address the stigma accompanying mental illness, train managers to support employee mental health, and provide affordable options for treatment and long-term therapy.
Establish Work-Life Balance
Covid-19 has reoriented workstyles. As at-home work becomes more common, many workers juggle chaotic schedules along with new demands such as stay-at-home children and spouses, further blurring the already-blurred line between work and personal life.
Employees want more flexibility and greater say over their work schedule. Mercer research also shows that employees want “permanent workplace flexibility” as part of a greater commitment to their health and wellbeing.
Providing flexible work schedules can be good for businesses according to Gartner’s 2020 ReimagineHR Employee Survey that found that offering employees flexibility over when, where and how much they work can boost the number of high performing employees from 36% to 55%.
Foster Connected Workplaces
Employees crave more connected workplaces. A Deloitte report found that 93 percent of respondents agree that “a sense of belonging drives organizational performance,” which is key to greater employee wellbeing and engagement, and better business results.
Admittedly, this has become more difficult during the pandemic. But it’s too important to ignore.
Creating friendlier, more connected workplaces can be very good for business. A 2019 study by BetterUp found that “workplace belonging” can lead to a 56 percent increase in job performance, a 50 percent reduction in turnover risk, and a 75 percent decrease in employee sick days.
Employers should ensure that social distancing does not lead to social isolation. Help workers stay connected with live or virtual coffee chats, lunch and learns, and happy hours, and other ways that boost morale and productivity and keep the workplace connected.
Just Ask
Employers shouldn’t impose new programs without employee input. Before developing new wellbeing initiatives, solicit employee input to ensure they address what workforces truly need to address their real-world challenges.
Conduct employee assessments and surveys (such as our free Employer Workplace Wellbeing Assessment and Employee Financial Wellbeing Assessment) to ensure that workers trust and welcome new programs, which can lead to higher participation, and better health, wellbeing and engagement and help employers focus their efforts to ensure greater workplace wellbeing.