Thrive Global: What the Pandemic Has Taught Us About Prioritizing Well-being at Work

"The eminent workplace academic Professor Sir Cary Cooper has spent many years reviewing Employee Assistance Programs (or EAPs) and found that routinely 60 per cent of the stress felt originates at home, with 40 per cent from work. But that also implies that we need to distinguish between real operational stresses – like poor management, working hours or pay and conditions – and personal mental ill health.

Most organizations approach well-being as a Band-Aid tool, because there is no time and no budget – the argument is often there are other more pressing priorities. However, the firms that excel at well-being (and the entire bottom line benefits it represents) do the opposite – they approach well-being as the foundation of the entire employee experience that covers all steps of an employee’s journey through the organisation instead of a separate or stand-alone project. They look at what it means across productivity, team management, engagement, or benefits. They see beyond the complexity and focus on what matters: human beings.

Every organisation should have a very senior person in charge of what wellness looks like in terms of policy, behaviour, and a positive impact on productivity will follow that.

The ‘right to disconnect’ campaign run by the British trade union Prospect is important and interesting.15 If you are expected to be ‘always on’ when your home set-up involves shared space, children, poor broadband, bad light, or even just a life which doesn’t want to be pinged constantly, and deserves some privacy, these will be rights which need protecting. Not having them is likely to lead to an increased sense of disempowerment, lower productivity and ultimately burnout.

The one size fits all model has been proven not to work in mainstream health, and it doesn’t apply in social health either. Customization needs to prevail.

Along with a sense of belonging, fairness and equality are essential for workplace well-being.

A working life will currently take up at least one third of our lives. The vast majority of us spend as much time with work colleagues as with our own families. In the freelance world of work in the Nowhere Office, workers will belong to several workplace families at once. So a useful model for workplace social health could be the blended family.

In short: workplace social health requires that the office functions like a community, a place where everyone has a sense of belonging, even if the ways and times in which they come together vary as much as the people themselves."

Read the full article here!

Reflection:

What do you think organizations could do to be more accommodating to employees' well-being?

#Workplace #Well-being #WorkLifeBalance #MentalHealth