Integrating Wellbeing into The Everyday Workplace
As employees face ongoing cost-of-living pressure, it’s important for leaders to ensure wellbeing measures are integrated and addressing employees’ diverse and nuanced needs.
“Mental wellbeing claims are the fastest growing claims across our entire client database at the moment,” said Alan Oates, Head of Advisory and Specialty in Asia Pacific for Health Solutions at Aon. “Five years ago, wellbeing was something of a tick-the-box exercise for many organisations. Now, it is a boardroom subject that is integrated into most business decisions.”
According to Jessie Pavelka, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Pavelka Wellness, there is still some way to go before the implementation of organisation-wide programmes really achieve their potential. “Behavioural change is hard — even more so from the perspective of an organisation or team. Although we know it is important and we have been talking about it more, defining the ‘how’ is not going to be easy. The trick is to turn concept and conversation into action.”
How can leaders successfully embed wellbeing in the workplace?
For wellbeing to be a true priority within the organisation, leaders must embrace a more holistic mindset and ensure more integration in business decision making and continual employee engagement. Although apps and technology are a convenient way to support engagement and gather behavioural data, Pavelka believes it is critical to incorporate the collection of soft data that measures employee feelings.
Pavelka Wellness offers human-centred wellbeing strategies grounded in The Four Elements: Eat, Sweat, Think, and Connect. Their point of view is based on a personal “one-size-fits-one” approach rather than an off-the-shelf one to transform beliefs and behaviour in the workplace. “We use listening insights to get a more well-rounded data set. Converting it into ROI requires more analysis, but that is where the real value lies.”
Although data with substance is crucial for creating robust and structured wellbeing programmes, organisations also need to bridge the information-action gap to keep employees engaged.
“The other solution lies in taking accountability on an individual level. If you are running a wellbeing programme in your organisation, make sure you are holding each other accountable, for example by checking in during meetings to confirm that everyone is doing what was agreed upon individually or as a team. There should be a level of ownership and a willingness to drive change,” he adds.
As medical insurers around the world continue to define and develop their wellbeing propositions, leaders can count on Aon to develop workplace wellbeing strategies based on the needs of their organisation. Oates said, “When it comes to analysing a wellbeing problem, no single insurer or other vendor can offer everything you need. At Aon, as an intermediary and adviser, we can correlate avoidable health claims and other engagement and performance data to assess where the wellbeing gaps are and then build a strategic wellbeing and health intervention programme based on these needs, supported by insurers and other partners.”
Watch the webinar for more insights on integrating wellbeing into the workplace and to learn how you can build a more resilient organisation. This webinar was the first event in our Resilient Conversations series for 2023.
