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When it comes to employee well-being, there’s a huge difference between communicating care and actually caring. When buzzwords don’t match an organization’s actions and proper resources or support aren’t in place, those good intentions end up on the back burner — and workers suffer the consequences.
Take the latest data from AXA’s 2024 Mind Health Report, which found that 79% of employees regularly experience work-related stress. The Health and Safety Executive Council in the UK reported that 50% of all work-related ill health is related to stress, anxiety and depression.
Yet Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report found only 24% of employees strongly agree that their organization cares about their overall well-being. Clearly, something's not adding up. No surprise that the employees who feel this way also tend to be less invested in their work: 77% of US employees either “quiet quit” or become disengaged.
Here’s how to pivot from talk to tactic.
Prioritize the Right Plan for Your People
Organizations should take a strategic approach to employee well-being, suggests clinical psychologist Dr. Jo Burrell, CEO and cofounder of Ultimate Resilience, which provides well-being and resilience training to organizations.
“Organizations are slowly making progress, but they’re massively playing catch-up,” she said. “They're hearing that well-being is a thing they need to be attending to, so they're grabbing the latest trend, workshop or app off the shelf and throwing it at the problem without thinking about whether it’s suited to their environment, employees and demographic. Too many employers aren't making savvy, evidence-based choices.”
Burrell notes short-term thinking and economic pressures to work harder and faster often drive decisions because finding the best solution requires a strong commitment. “But there’s no point spending money and resources and wasting your employee's time on initiatives that don't work,” she said.
Taking the time to find an effective approach can make a huge difference, not just to your employee's experience and well-being, but also to their productivity and the company’s bottom line.
Related Article: Workplace Well-Being Efforts Are a Band-Aid, Not a Cure
Stop Treating Employees Like Line Items
Rachel Happe, an organizational strategist who founded Engaged Organizations to help companies build stronger community-driven cultures, said few organizations understand the operational differences between the mechanistic system they use for supply chain or financial work and the human work carried out by marketing, customer services, sales and innovation.
“Our whole governance structure is not built for the human system inside our organizations,” she said. “We manage all systems like they're mechanistic, but humans and machines have very different dynamics.”
It's impossible to optimize one system with the tools used to optimize the other, she added. Caring for employees requires time and energy, something that’s difficult to measure and may not result in immediate impact. That leaves most organizations talking about a desire for a healthy workplace; yet not doing much to make it happen.
“People aren't assets on the balance sheet. So, investing in them never shows up as improved financial performance. In fact, it creates risk because the more you invest, the more they cost and the lower your productivity, financially speaking,” said Happe.
Plus, unless rewarded for it, managers won’t spend time on well-being instead of other tasks that will show up in their performance review. Most aren’t encouraged to make decisions based on their human instincts, especially if productivity software is monitoring every keystroke.
“The problem with technology is that it has accelerated and intensified the mechanistic structure. Managers almost have to betray themselves to do the right human thing,” said Happe. “What you have now is a world where managers can't actually make exceptions. An employee can't admit their grandmother is dying and they’re really upset; 30 years ago, a good manager would've said, ‘Go home’. Now, everything gets tracked and the manager gets punished for doing that even if the employee doesn't.”
Related Article: A Simple Fix to Employee Disengagement: Cut the Crap
Create — and Reward — a Caring Culture
Happe sees three ways to move the needle toward improving employee well-being, beginning with changing metrics to reward it.
"I would invest in training managers and reducing the headcount they’re responsible for,” she said.
She also suggests companies separate project and program managers from people managers because they focus on different skillsets. “If you're just a people manager, you could be more of a mentor and career guide rather than a work overseer. If you combine them — ‘I want you to finish this project. Oh, and you should take time off’ — those are mixed messages,” she explained.
Then, she said she would advise organizations to prioritize employee well-being and protect the time required for it. That means trusting leaders to do the right thing. “If you’re managing your people like machines, you're not going to be a caring organization. You cannot extend trust to others before you get it. You're not going to solve the caring problem,” she said.
Finally, provide managers with discretionary budget.
“The biggest thing for me is there’s no line item for reflection, discussion or perspective taking in your budget. Fewer and fewer levels of managers get any discretionary budget. I was managing 10 people at one point and if everybody was exhausted, I couldn't say, ‘Hey, let's go out to lunch today,’” said Happe.
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Caring requires noticing, and it can’t be done at scale, she added. “It's about empowering managers to be caring so they can say, ‘We just all went through this big effort to get this thing done, and we're all exhausted and cranky; let's take the afternoon off.’”
Related Article: 5 Ways to Unleash Employee Potential in Digital Workplaces
Equip Your Leaders With the Right People Tools
Employees are often promoted to managerial positions after having proven their technical skills, but they’ve never been trained in people skills required to support staff well-being, noted Burrell.
“And then suddenly, they're having tricky, nuanced, sensitive conversations with staff about their well-being — and that's difficult,” she said.
Burrell recommends companies provide managers with frameworks within which they can have safe conversations with employees about their well-being.
“This helps them understand where their responsibility lies, and what's outside of it. We're not actually expecting managers to solve everyone's problems; we need them to support people and their work functioning,” she said.
For instance, some of the techniques leaders can learn include active listening skills and knowing when to refer employees for the help they need.
“It’s more about making sure leaders have a good understanding of services available within your organization so that you can signpost people to those resources. Often, managers have no clue what their employee assistance program involves or how to access it,” said Burrell.
Related Article: Corporate Well-Being Efforts Aren't Working. That Doesn't Mean Abandon Ship
Support Managers’ Well-Being, Too
Burrell noted that organizations often forget to consider how managers feel. “If we're asking our leaders to talk to their staff about their well-being, we need to be first thinking about our leaders’ well-being,” she said.
“They have huge responsibilities and pressures and are vulnerable to well-being difficulties and mental health issues, so we need to support them.”
Modeling healthy behaviors sets the tone within teams, giving workers permission to do the same.
“As employees, we don't feel we have permission to set healthy boundaries around our work if our managers aren't doing that, too,” Burrell explained.
Focus on the Future
Organizations with a caring culture can better attract and retain talent, noted Happe.
“The ones that are beacons of excellence in their fields do this. If you can't trust people, you're throttling yourself,” she said. “People will surprise you in amazing ways, but you have to give them space to do that. If you only want to tell people what to do, you're in a commodity employment business.”
