Eight Steps to Building a Culture of Employee Wellbeing

How to Create a Culture that Puts Wellbeing at Its Heart

Once upon a time, health and wellbeing at work just covered our work life - tasks, stress levels, and work environment, affecting our overall health and happiness, both in and out of work. It encapsulates physical health effects from work, like incorrect desk setups and back problems or eye strain from a screen. It’s also about how our work life can affect our mood and mental health.

Today, a culture of wellbeing covers much more and includes financial situations, emotional health and overall resilience - it's a holistic approach that considers our personal lives and family situations.

Achieving positive wellbeing at work can help us reach our potential, be productive and creative, build strong relationships with our colleagues, and manage any stress that crops up. Having a culture that looks at wellbeing at work isn’t just the right thing to do for your employees. It also benefits employers. 

Here are five benefits of creating a culture of wellbeing: 

1. Reduce employee absenteeism.
2. Create a happy workplace.
3. Boost productivity and motivation.
4. Attract and retain talent.
5. Improve employee engagement 

Our eight steps to building a culture of wellbeing at work will take you everything you need to know to succeed. 

Step One: Understand the Five Pillars of Employee Wellbeing 

When we look at employee wellbeing, physical and mental health are often the first to mind, but there are many more, as we explore in our blog, ‘The Five Pillars to Employee Wellbeing Success’.

Wellbeing pillars include:

• Mental and emotional wellbeing: Creating an environment where people can be themselves and support mental health issues.
• Social wellbeing: Promoting collaboration and creating opportunities for connection and relationship building.
• Financial wellbeing: Reducing the stigma around money pressures, as well as providing education, support, and tools to help with money management.
• Physical wellbeing: Supporting employees in making positive physical health choices and introducing schemes and initiatives that can help.
• Digital wellbeing: Creating an environment where tech is there to improve how we work and ensures everyone has the tech they need, but is also trained on best practices on how to use it.

Step Two: Get Senior Leaders to Support and Act as Role Models

When making any change in a business, your senior leaders need to be on board, and this is particularly important when looking at wellbeing at work. Any communication you do about your wellbeing programme should highlight that leaders care about employee health, ensuring you show your people you value them. 

Leadership should act as role models and advocates for your wellbeing programme. If they actively participate in your schemes and initiatives, it can encourage other employees to do so. 

Step Three: Understand the Needs of Your Employees 

To support your employees' health and wellbeing, it’s essential to talk to them to understand what they would want from a wellbeing programme. Find out what they’re worried about, any problems or concerns that come up during the day, and what they need support with. 

You could do a survey, questionnaire, or gather a panel of employees across different departments and levels and put in a face-to-face session to discuss it. 

Step Four: Use Employee Feedback to Form the Basis of Your Strategy 

Once you’ve spoken to your employees and understood what they need from a wellbeing strategy, you can start to look at the areas in which you can make an impact. For example, if your employees are struggling with managing stress or mental health issues, you could introduce an Employee Assistance Programme offering them free, confidential advice 24/7 from BACP-accredited counsellors, face-to-face, via email or phone. 

You could offer Financial Wellbeing Services like education and saving options for employees with money troubles. Stretch their salaries further and help them afford more of what matters most with our Employee Discounts Scheme, cashback-earning Pluxee Card or Salary Sacrifice Schemes. 

We can all feel isolated from time to time, and if your workforce is struggling with that, you could look at different initiatives to try and bring people together. 

Step Five: Define Your Goals 

The next step in creating a culture that focuses on wellbeing at work is understanding what you want to get out of it. Are you looking to improve employee retention or boost morale, happiness and productivity? 

Setting goals helps you focus on what you want to achieve and understand how you are doing. They can also help you evaluate if things need to change. 

Step Six: Share Your Plans 

Having a substantial wellbeing programme is not enough in isolation. Your employees must know what's available to them, or you won't make an impact or see a return on investment. Whether you’ve focused on wellbeing at work before or this is your first time, launching it with a bang is vital. 

Make effective use of all your communication channels and highlight the benefits of wellbeing and what’s now available. Try to do more than just emails. Create super users and video content - share testimonials from people who’ve used the benefits, or senior leaders talking about the new programmes. You could even bring in external wellbeing experts and share free resources.