What’s causing this? And, what can we do as individuals and companies to fix it? 

The common refrain from the business community is that it’s a complicated and multifaceted issue that has no real solution. Or, that the available solutions are “impractical” and prohibitively expensive.

I call bullshit on that.

There’s a simple solution that is essentially free…Treat people like awesome and valued humans. And everything you can to help them THRIVE!

As individuals and businesses, this must become a priority if wellbeing and performance are going to improve.

The elephant in the room that people keep ignoring?

That healthy, happy, engaged people produce MUCH better work and sustain higher performance over the long term.

This makes both human and financial sense, and is even well understood at the conceptual level. However, companies and leaders are missing the boat to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars annually by not putting that awareness into practical action.

This concept is supported by recent global research data from McKinsey that nails down the Business Case for Facilitating Thriving at Work. 

Decades of my own experience working with corporate leaders and their organizations, combined with recent research from McKinsey and many other top institutions have highlighted the actions that both individuals and companies can take to cultivate an environment of thriving.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Your future self (and workplace) will thank you for it! 

The McKinsey Health Institute report I refer to was written by the brilliant Jacqueline Brassey and her colleagues. It has many valuable takeaways for senior executives and their organizations about the economic value and business case for improving employee health outside of the traditional healthcare context.

Their one sentence overview states:

“Better aligning employment with modifiable drivers of health could unlock years of higher quality life and create trillions of dollars of economic value.”

That’s VERY pretty powerful. My question is…

“If improving employee wellbeing makes so much financial sense, why isn’t this happening across the majority of the corporate world?”

Before I get into my thoughts on this gap, here’s the TLDR Summary for the McKinsey report. It’s cleverly titled “Working Nine to Thrive”:

• Work environment, culture, and leadership have a massive impact on employee health.
• Employers have the opportunity to impact employee health through six key drivers:
  • Social interaction
  • Mindsets and beliefs
  • Productive activity
  • Stress
  • Economic security
  • Sleep (Not sure how most companies are impacting this as a primary driver. Napping at the office? Not sending midnight texts/emails to employees?)
• The global impact of these factors could create $3.7 to $11.7 Trillion in economic value

In other words, it would be extremely smart for companies to take employee health and wellbeing MUCH more seriously than they have.

I go even further to say I believe it’s their fiduciary duty to improve employee wellbeing…at least to a point of diminishing returns.

At this point, companies haven’t even scratched the surface of the financial and human ROI on these efforts.

Since March 2020, our world has shown that despite overwhelming evidence of the benefit of improved employee wellbeing, AND a global spotlight shining on the challenges employees are facing, change is not happening from within.

Correction. Lots of noise is being made about wellness, and companies have poured billions into the same “wellness money pits” that weren’t working in the pre-pandemic world. Smart executives understand this and are changing the game and narrative around employee wellbeing and corporate performance.

Note that wellbeing is different than wellness.

Put simply, wellness is the tactics and wellbeing is the desired outcome of performing wellness activities.

The implication of this difference is at the heart of why workplace wellness programs fail miserably and do not produce the ROI they are capable of. Here’s a short post that highlights the wellness-wellbeing gap (https://timborys.com/wellness-vs-wellbeing-whats-the-difference/). 

As we’ve seen in the corporate world, wellness “features” don’t necessarily create employee wellbeing. There’s MUCH more that leaders and companies must do to improve wellbeing than simply increasing the benefits budget and scheduling a few more wellness seminars into employees already busy calendars.

The secret to great health? Escape the healthcare matrix.

In a separate McKinsey article, titled “The secret to great health? Escaping the healthcare matrix.”, the authors identify 23 drivers of health (like we need another list of things that improve/decrease health), but the main theme is something that I’ve been helping clients overcome for the past 25 years…that modern healthcare is not about health. It’s about treating sickness.

It’s well known by now that an absence of illness (not being sick) is not the same thing as being healthy and thriving, yet almost all of our modern medical system and corporate wellness programming is based on the medical model and a foundation of “sick care” masquerading as “wellness”.

Additionally, the majority of the tools, resources, and programs available to employees are reactionary and self-serve. They are focussed on treating the symptoms of poor health and wellness rather than proactively improving wellbeing up front.

Human Flourishing and Sustainable Performance

Facilitating thriving at work (an important part of the “human sustainability” and “human flourishing” movements) goes far beyond finding the latest and greatest wellness app or employee engagement activity. It strikes at the philosophical heart of business strategy. It upends traditional corporate culture, shakes up leadership mindsets, and redefines the roles and expectations of companies, leaders, and employees.

My experience in consulting and from coaching thousands of corporate clients is that poor employee wellbeing stems with a flawed mindset at the executive leadership level. This comes from several misguided and often conflicting belief systems. Leaders believe that:

• The company is already addressing employee wellness by increasing benefits, seminars, education, office amenities, flex time, etc.
• Wellness is mostly an employee responsibility aside from basic benefits.
• Younger generations are too soft and needy. They just need to show up and get their work done (I’ve literally heard senior executives use these words).
• Wellness costs too much and we have more pressing areas to allocate our budget.

Facilitating Wellbeing is FREE

The reality is that wellbeing doesn’t stem from benefits, perks, office amenities, one-off education sessions, or on-site fitness classes. While these can be great “tools in the toolbox”, true wellbeing comes from:

• Having a great leader that hears, sees, respects, and appreciates you while inspiring and challenging you to be a greater person and contributor to the team.
• Having a psychologically safe workplace where you can learn, grow, develop, and contribute your greatest skills to a cause that’s bigger than yourself, while knowing specifically how your contribution makes a positive difference.

These points cost nothing, yet are the foundations of improving employee performance and wellbeing. The issue is that providing this environment requires thinking, acting, and leading in a VERY different way to what is considered standard across most of the corporate world.

It’s also the reason the majority of employees are still stressed, burned out, disengaged, and why companies are losing valuable people to the company next door. The one that’s willing to pay them a few more dollars. Or the one that even pays them less, but provides a positive, engaging employee experience.

The Smartest Workplace Wellbeing You Can Make? Effective Leadership Training!

The smartest investments companies can make are in properly training leaders across the organization to consistently deliver on the above employee experience. By reallocating existing resources, many of my clients have found that it cost them very little, or nothing at all. Of course, this first requires executive leaders to admit that what they’ve been doing isn’t working.

An interesting study from the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre found that the three top factors for the companies that scored best on well-being were:

• Feeling energized
• Belonging
• Trust

Interestingly, the top drivers that employees THOUGHT would make them happy and drive well-being were:

• Pay
• Flexibility

This was wellbeing data from more than 15 million employees and the analysis of underlying workplace factors driving their wellbeing. The researchers identified and tested 11 factors, including compensation, flexibility, purpose, inclusion, achievement, support, trust, belonging, management, and learning.

Their results continue to fly in the face of traditional management and leadership practices.

6 Wellbeing Drivers for Corporations

These findings also fit well with the 6 wellbeing drivers that McKinsey claimed businesses have control over:

Social interaction

Social interaction at work can often be cringy. The problem comes when companies try to add ad hoc social events to a toxic or disengaged workplace culture. If you can’t stand your coworkers, employees, or don’t feel psychologically safe, attending a social event will be excruciating.

Before social interaction will be beneficial, companies and leaders must do the hard work of looking in the mirror to address the shortcomings that are leading to low psychological safety, “bad boss” behaviour, and toxic workplace culture.

This starts with setting a standard for leadership training and actions. Teaching leaders how to have productive 1:1 meetings with their team (it still amazes me how few leaders utilize this powerful tool effectively). McKinsey found that leaders trained to use 1:1 meetings as a vehicle to ask employees what was important to them and where they needed support was a way to build psychological safety and individual wellbeing.

This is NOT rocket science, but it still shocks me how few leaders actually do this. Again, simple leadership training programs can address this.

When psychological safety was high, they found that helping team members prioritize their tasks and assisting to remove blockers to progress improved individual wellbeing and performance.

Mindsets and Beliefs

Cultivating a growth mindset and practicing gratitude has been repeatedly demonstrated to improve both mental and physical health. 

Employees that experience positive experiences at work have much higher wellbeing and performance over time, even when stress levels are high. Leaders can cultivate these experiences by curating an environment where people practice living a growth mindset, have high self-efficacy, high adaptability, a feeling of meaning, and a feeling of belonging.

At both the organizational and leadership levels, this also includes connecting employees to the company’s mission, vision, and values through storytelling and practical daily reinforcement and demonstration of actions. This is particularly important for senior leaders to model.

Purpose-driven companies that consistently apply these strategies have been shown to grow as fast as their competitors while also achieving gains in employee satisfaction, employee retention, and consumer trust. This is one of the most powerful and underutilized strategic advantages a company can have. It simply requires seeing the role of leaders through a new lens.

Productive Activity

Wellbeing, engagement, loyalty and trust increases when companies help their employees connect with meaningful and productive activities in their region and community. This can include volunteering, mentoring, spending time on hobbies, traveling, and active leisure pursuits. This can also be combined with the social interaction component of driver #1.

Companies that do this show increases in employee self-efficacy (the belief that they can cope with difficult or changing situations) which in turn leads to greater productivity. Again, it comes from a genuine change in organizational mindset and perspective, followed by upgraded leadership actions and employee experience. Otherwise these productive activities are only a short term reprieve from a crappy work environment!

Stress

The most misunderstood thing about stress is that people think it’s “BAD”. The second misconception is that all stress is created equal. Stress is a natural part of life and in fact we need a certain level of stress in life to function and finding our optimal level will allow us to thrive in all areas of life. We also have eustress (productive stress), and distress (destructive stress). This means the goal isn’t to eliminate stress, but to reduce distress and optimize eustress across our life.

As a leader or company, our role is to ensure team members are engaged, inspired, and challenged appropriately, without overwhelming them with workload, scope, or bureaucracy. Chronically elevated stress levels increase risk of many disease types (cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurodegenerative diseases, and plus mental health and burnout).

Providing recovery intervals and teaching coping strategies is essential for building resilience, reducing risk, and improving sustainable performance, particularly in traditionally high stress or cyclical/seasonal industries and roles. 

Economic Security

Financial health is extremely important and positively correlated with mental and physical health. Companies and leaders that actively and consistently help employees build strong financial wellness see excellent long term returns on their investments. Paying livable wages is a great start for companies, followed by assisting in ongoing education and programs to increase savings and wealth creation.

Sleep

With more than ⅓ of the population chronically sleep deprived, lack of sleep is a massive drain on productivity, performance, and wellbeing. MHI research shows that the #1 factor causing employees lack of sleep is their occupational workload and their ability to adjust to unexpected changes. 

Employers have the power to positively impact employees’ sleep on multiple levels. First, creating manageable and sustainable workloads and expectations will have the biggest impact. Second, strategically helping employees build skills needed to improve resilience, adaptability, and “sleep hygiene”. Lastly, creating a work environment that is stimulating, engaging, inclusive, has boundaries between work and home, and where leaders model healthy work and sleep habits over the long term.

Being Well at Work Is Not Rocket Science. It Just Requires Leadership!

None of these items are new and most are well known in organizations. Change starts with executive leadership deciding to take control of the narrative and implement measurable strategies for success in these key areas. 

Change can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Once an executive vision for linking performance and wellbeing is in place, the key is to have daily actions by leaders across the organization aligning with these desired outcomes, and consistent tracking of progress. These success skills are utilized in most areas of the organization, but have traditionally fallen flat when addressing the wellness-wellbeing gap.

Why Change Fails…And What to Do.

The challenge is that many companies try to handle this internally, through their HR team. From experience, I can tell you that this is a recipe for bureaucracy and disaster. The HR team can be a great partner in the implementation process, but having an outside and independent voice to consult, coach, and “hold up the uncomfortable mirror of change” for executive leadership is critical to establishing the vision and a successful strategy. Once this critical piece of the puzzle is in place, my team and I can work with stakeholders across all departments to ensure smooth communications, implementation, and accountability for results.

Let’s Chat

Still unsure of what this would look like for your team or organization? Let’s chat. Reach out here, and we will set up a time to discuss how to optimize the ROI for your organization.

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Links and Resources

• McKinsey Health Institute

• https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/working-nine-to-thrive?cid=soc-web

• https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/the-secret-to-great-health-escaping-the-healthcare-matrix

• https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/toxic-workplace-behavior-and-employee-burnout-fix-one-fix-both