Workplace Wellbeing Made Simple: Part One

Why employee wellbeing matters

Before we walk through the steps to take to get your employee wellbeing initiative off the ground, it’s worth reflecting on why workplace wellbeing is so important.

Here are some useful insights: 

• 75% of employees feel more loyal towards their employer if they feel supported.

• 76% of employees feel more motivated when their organisation is supporting them.

• 61% of employees want their workplace to help them more with the rising cost of living.

Businesses that focus on employee wellbeing, benefit. It’s as simple as that. Employees aren’t asking employers to prioritise their wellbeing; they’re demanding it.

An organisation’s employee wellbeing offering forms part of an employee’s decision to join and stay with a business. It’s an investment that pays in the form of increased retention rates and better productivity.

Culture

In our blog, Employee Wellbeing: More than a Tick Box Exercise, we discuss why and how organisations should approach employee wellbeing as a business strategy, with culture being a key element.

An organisation’s culture is its character, personality, and the way it gets things done. You may have defined your culture many years ago, and if employee wellbeing wasn’t part of your culture historically, then it needs to be now.

Redefining and enhancing your company culture from across the board requires you to start at the bottom and lead from the top. What we mean by this is that you need to start with the basics, such as how and what you communicate with your employees. However, business leaders must be aligned and committed before this change begins.

Start with your people

We often use the statement, ‘start with your people’ because if you want to impact your workforce positively, speaking with them before you start your employee wellbeing initiative makes sense.

Get the lay of the land by asking them to complete an anonymous survey. You can ask any questions you need to, but if your aim is to assess their wellbeing needs, the below will help to paint a picture of the current state of their wellbeing:

Example One: yes or no questions.

1. Mental Wellbeing: Do you feel that you need support with your mental health?

2. Physical Wellbeing: Do you think that your physical health could be better?

3. Financial Wellbeing: Are you cutting costs to afford daily essentials?

Example Two: multiple choice questions.

1. Mental Wellbeing: How often do you feel stressed in the workplace?

2. Physical Wellbeing: How often do you take a walk at lunch?

3. Financial Wellbeing: How often do you feel concerned about your finances?

For this example, you could have multiple options, such as those listed below:

• Never

• Sometimes

• Often

• Always

Example Three: scaled questions.

On a scale of one to ten, one being ‘not at all comfortable’ and ten being ‘very comfortable’, rate the following statements.

1. Mental Wellbeing: I feel comfortable speaking with my manager about my mental wellbeing.

2. Physical Wellbeing: I feel comfortable speaking with my manager about health concerns.

3. Financial Wellbeing: I feel comfortable speaking with my manager about the state of my personal finances.

These three examples and question sets alone will provide valuable data, revealing how your employees feel about their personal situation and whether there’s a trusting relationship between your employees and the business.

This paints a clear picture of the wellbeing of your employees and provides an overview of the health of the current culture with regard to mental, physical, and financial wellbeing.

Define your goals

Before you start speaking with your employees, you must have defined goals and visualise where the business wants to be and what your workplace wellbeing offering will look like. However, what’s crucial is to tackle the project with flexibility. If the data from your employee responses is different to what was expected, it may require a change in direction.

It’s essential that any direction your business takes is driven by the data, or you’re at risk of implementing employee wellbeing initiatives, strategies, and benefits that may not be fit for purpose.

43% of employees in the healthcare industry didn’t think the employee benefits offered aligned with their needs.

When the employee benefits provided as part of your workplace wellbeing strategy don’t meet your employees’ needs, they won’t use them.

We encourage businesses to view employee wellbeing as a business strategy because, when done right, it positively impacts your people and company. Get it wrong, and it’s simply an expense that yields little to no return.

Map your journey

We’ve created a step-by-step guide on establishing a wellbeing strategy as part of our Wellbeing Pack, which you can download here.  

When starting from scratch or over-hauling your current wellbeing offering, we recommend staggering the introduction of employee benefits to avoid overwhelm and boost engagement and uptake.

Review & measure

Once your employee wellbeing initiative has found its feet, monitoring how it performs is essential. Multiple elements can impact the success of your employee wellbeing strategy – with communication often being the core issue.

Measure uptake to gain insights as to how engaged your employees are with their employee benefits and your wellbeing initiatives. In addition to understanding if your wellbeing strategy is impacting your people, you need to know if you’re gaining a return on investment.

Your employee wellbeing strategy should have your people at its heart, focusing on supporting them in the workplace and beyond. However, it’s also vital for the business to see the positives, such as higher engagement rates or reduced absenteeism levels.

In part two of this topic, we’ll address making employee benefits cost-effective, but it’s worth addressing here as part of your review process. If your business isn’t seeing a measurable return on the employee benefits being offered, then you need to find and address the cause.

Pluxee UK... measuring our success by yours

The best journeys are those taken in partnership with someone else. With over 60 years of employee wellbeing and engagement experience under our belt, Pluxee UK will help drive the success of your wellbeing strategy.

Request a call from one of our employee engagement and wellbeing experts today, and they’ll help you make workplace wellbeing simple and effective.