How to engage employees to enhance their health, happiness and wellbeing

We are all living and operating with a backdrop of ongoing uncertainty and change with increased costs of living, a pending recession, ongoing redundancies to name a few. In such challenging times, wellbeing initiatives implemented during the pandemic may no longer address the challenges and needs of today’s workforce.

In fact, according to the British Medical Association, the number of adults accessing mental health treatments has risen by 71%. Yet 1 in 3 managers feel out of their depth supporting their team with mental health concerns (MHFA 2023).

Given the world we live in today, many HR leaders are proactively taking the decision to reevaluate their workplace wellbeing offerings to ensure that they are supporting their employees in the most appropriate and relevant ways.

Engaging employees in their health and wellbeing

In the latest of a series of roundtables held by Global HR Executive and supported by Tictrac, a group of HR leaders came together for peer to peer discussions to benchmark where their own organisations are at with workplace wellbeing post pandemic.

These insights have been summarised in an exclusive report on how to ‘Engage, empower and enable employees to enhance their health, happiness and wellbeing‘ with a deep dive into the following core themes:

• The macro environment we live in as organisations and employees
• Demand on leadership are growing and evolving
• Employees are facing a myriad of choices
• The work environment has changed forever

Below we explore some of the points discussed around the role of leadership teams in empowering employees’ wellbeing as well as how employees’ requirements have shifted over the years.

Leaders – The champions of wellbeing and employee engagement

During the peer to peer roundtable conversations it became apparent that today’s leaders are seen as the champions of wellbeing within many organisations. It was also recognised that high performing teams are looking for leaders who:

• Prioritise wellbeing
• Build credibility with Employee Advisory Groups (EAGs)
• Understood and trusted employee engagement data
• Kept an eye on high stress events such as M&A and restructuring

Supporting data driven decisions around employee wellbeing initiatives

It was also recognised that leaders may sometimes suffer from perception biases. For example one participant mentioned that ‘some leaders felt that their remote staff were less engaged and that this also led to high turnover. Yet the data said otherwise: remote employees were actually more engaged and experienced less turnover.’

It was therefore agreed that in times of change, it is important for HR leaders to:

• Trust the data as much as the team leader when assessing the impact of workplace initiatives
• Use data to support decision making
• Use it to bring a new perspective to assumptions being made

Employees have greater demands and more fragmented requirements

Roundtable participants all agreed that employees are faced with many challenges in their day to day. From a reduced sense of resilience and belonging to employee isolation or again the difficulties that come along with hybrid ways of working. With this came the question ‘Where does the responsibility of a business for the welfare of its staff start and stop?’.

Whilst there is no simple solution to these challenges, some of the ideas shared on the day were that employers do need to consider a range of factors including: financial assistance, lifestage considerations, general health and career guidance to name a few.

Workplace wellbeing in today’s world

As employees continue to face a number of stress factors, organisations can play an important role in supporting employees with their physical health, mental wellbeing and overall happiness – which in turn benefits the companies as a whole. This touches all levels of the organisation from HR leaders, to team leaders and the active participation of employees.

To access the newly released peer to peer insights from the 2023 roundtable discussions on how to ‘Engage, empower and enable employees to enhance their health, happiness and wellbeing’, download the executive summary report here: Exclusive report