By Steph Hind, Co-Founder of Heka
Employee wellness programmes have very much come to the forefront of HR policy and practice. Protecting the wellbeing of staff has become essential for the obvious reason of looking after your people but also for having a hugely positive impact on the success of the business.
Unfortunately, progress has slowed to a crawl and the wellbeing of employees has just become another task to tick off the list. Why?
Having worked with some of the biggest organisations on their wellbeing programmes, I’ve noticed a clear trend.
Identifying the ‘why’
Simon Sinek, marketing guru and viral sensation, did a Ted Talk 15 years ago on ‘finding your why’ which seemed to resonate with marketers and senior leaders the world over. It’s fed into strategies and seminars over the last decade, pushing people in sales and marketing to focus on why their company does what it does as opposed to just focusing on what. When you identify the ‘why’, you can make ‘what’ you do resonate far more with your audience.
But this exceptional strategy never left the marketing department.
This is where employee wellbeing programmes are failing. They’re too prescriptive and too focused on ‘what’ they offer, rather than ‘why’ they would offer such initiatives. The ‘what’ becomes ‘things’ – gym discounts or memberships, fruit bowls in kitchens, online counselling – while the ‘why’ is neglected – providing real support for real people with varied wants and needs.
When you take this into account, it becomes clear that employee wellness programmes are too static and fail to adapt to individual employees’ wellness needs, particularly their changing needs depending on their current stage of life.
You can confidently tick the boxes – ‘We offer financial wellbeing because we host an annual webinar on inflation’ – but can you confidently say you really support your employees, especially on an individual level?
Perks versus the reality of wellbeing
Unsurprisingly, many tick box employee ‘perks’ are left untouched; wellbeing is different for everyone. While a gym membership is great for one employee, it can have negative consequences on wellbeing for another.
But also, many wellbeing ‘perks’ are rolled out without any real consideration of their usage and application in the real world.
Take discounts and vouchers for example, a common ‘perk’ in many companies. The normal, human course of action would be ‘I fancy a coffee – I just remembered my company offers a discount at my local coffee shop – I’ll use it in store.’
But the actual perk requires you to log in to a site, find the discount, request the discount, search for it in your emails and junk folder, only to discover the code takes 48 hours to come through – all to save 10% on a flat white…
In other words, it doesn’t take into account real, human experiences.
The happiness illusion
The lack of engagement in wellbeing programmes creates a snowball effect. HR teams continue to roll out new benefits and perks, one on top of the other, without any real thought for how employees will actually physically engage with them in day-to-day life. This results in a blurred picture for all involved. Employees have to navigate a complex web of benefits that are hard to access and HR teams have to make sense of the various benefits, engagement rates and data points coming from various platforms.
Potentially the most damaging part of all of this is the perception from financial teams and the C-Suite. They continue to see additional benefits rolled out by HR teams, engagement continuing to fall, and investment continuing to increase. Confidence will drop and employee wellbeing becomes something that ‘doesn’t work’.
Alternatively, if HR teams are blinding the C-Suite with stats and facts about the various employee benefits, the opposite could happen which can be just as damaging. The company operates as if it is doing the absolute most for its staff and shifts the blame of poor productivity, sickness rates, retention rates and talent acquisition onto employees.
In either scenario, the employee loses out. It’s a vicious cycle and why it’s so important to rethink employee wellbeing.
Breaking the cycle
So the question becomes: How do HR leaders break this cycle? Their first big hurdle is investigating the complex web of (mostly) unused, prescriptive, static benefits. Then, they have to try and change the mindset of the C-Suite – employee wellbeing does work, we just have the wrong strategy, or our existing policy isn’t working and we need to look after our staff more effectively.
These two steps become a lot easier when there is an alternative. Your strategy needs to be tailored to each employee, adaptive to their changing needs, varied, and easily accessible. Involve employees in the decision-making process so they get to choose what benefits them best rather than dictating benefits that just don’t resonate with them.
Importantly, start with ‘why’. If the true goal is to ensure your employees feel supported, that they’re not merely surviving but thriving, this will enable you to focus more clearly on what the strategy should be. This is how HR teams can transform employee wellness programmes and have a huge impact within their organisations.
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