In March 2020, everything changed. For many employees, it was their first experience working from home, and for the first time, employee wellness came to the forefront of workplace culture. The following two years changed the workplace, making hybrid, flexible and fully remote working arrangements a normal part of white collar work.
However, in recent years, the focus has shifted to bringing employees back to the office more consistently, with concerns around wellness and productivity at the forefront. But the importance of wellness at work transcends the remote working debate. While the impacts were transformative in many ways, there are other factors at play, including a notable increase in economic uncertainty and a decline in job security in the years following the pandemic.
One of the main factors to consider in future workplace planning is employee wellbeing. Dr. David Hamilton, our kindness tsar and author of 11 books on wellness, said
“Mental health and wellbeing are being taken more seriously now than at any time I’ve ever known."
That thought rings true for many people in the UK and worldwide.
Here at Talent Insight Group, we strive to improve our wellness culture. We conduct regular surveys to analyse our employees' needs and act on the insights we receive to ensure we create a culture that prioritises our employees.
35% of office workers said their mental health had degraded since the shift to working from home during the pandemic. So, what can you do to put wellbeing at the centre of your organisation? How can you implement a successful wellness programme? What should this look like? How can wellness influence workplace culture?
Employee wellness can work wonders for creating a healthy and positive working environment.
“Employee wellness comes from two sides” said Emily Lofting-Kisakye, HR Director for Cognita Schools.
“From the non-commercial business side, it’s important because you want people to live balanced healthy lives and want them to understand what happiness is for them and how they can provide balance to themselves. In the commercial/corporate sense, the better the wellbeing and balance is, the better the productivity; there’s less employee turnover, less cost of hiring – there are real quantifiable benefits [to workplace wellness].”
But really, how does wellness influence culture?
When a company is investing in its people through a wellbeing programme, it absolutely contributes to a stronger brand and better attraction. While it may be easy for a company to mention employee wellness on their website, it’s another thing entirely to put this into practice. Candidates are likely to do their research on a business before applying, so many are now looking on sites such as Glassdoor to understand the lived experience of normal employees.
Every person we interviewed said that wellness has to come from the top. If it’s recognised that senior leadership teams are engaging with, and sign-posting resources, employees are more likely to utilise them.
“You have to mean it” said Derren Young when asked how companies can engrain wellness into their culture. “Only commit to what you can achieve. A company is nothing without its people. If they’re not happy, we’re not a good company.”
Emily Lofting-Kisakye also added a point which cannot be overstated: “Top-down leadership is the most important. If your executives don’t model and lead it, where will it go? Support and resources for direct managers is also important as they are the most connected [to the workforce].”
A study from the American Psychological Association agrees with our experts. It shows that workplace wellness programmes with senior leadership support yielded positive employee outcomes. 89% of employees said they would recommend their company as a great place to work, and 91% said they were more motivated to do their best at work as a result.
As we appreciate the individual and financial benefits of a wellness-focused culture, we wanted to understand what our colleagues needed from us to be happy and productive, both inside and outside of work. So in 2020, we decided to implement a wellness programme of our own, starting with a short anonymous survey.
Questions included:
The most important question, however, was:
We built our wellness programme based on the feedback we received, splitting it into three priorities based on the responses.
The chart below shows the first survey's results, which identified work/life balance, team building, and stress management as the top support requests.
Some of the key outcomes we were able to implement quickly included:
Ensuring we regularly look for new tools, articles, and resources to share with our staff.
Helping to build camaraderie across teams, especially when working remotely.
We continue to run an annual wellness survey to collect feedback and ideas to improve our offering. This has resulted in the addition of additional wellness support, including:
Every TIG employee has access to an accredited counsellor with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and a life coach who specialises in stress management, resilience and work-life balance. Employees can use these services with the confidence that it’s completely confidential, and all the business will see is an anonymised invoice.
We’re keenly aware of the temptation to work longer hours, but we know this doesn’t support productivity long-term and can cause a disconnect between home and office life. So our team members are encouraged to set a reasonable timeframe to shut off that working brain and take advantage of the time outside of work to relax and recharge. One of the practical ways we support this is through an early finish on a Friday.
Our 2024 survey showed that these changes meant that all our staff felt supported, although there is always room for us to improve. The top three requests for more support were around work/life balance, mental health and a request for more external speakers at team events.
Workplace wellness is not a corporate fad or just a buzzword used to improve brand perception. It is a movement, an all-encompassing solution that brings out the best in your team. It increases happiness, support, and productivity. It has the power to bring people together and positively impact a business culture and bottom line.
Dr. David Hamilton emphasised this: “When people are healthy in their body and mind, they are more productive. They’re more friendly. There’s less absenteeism because people are not off with stress or mental health leave. When people are mentally healthier, we are more creative.”
People are more aware of wellness programmes at work, and are more inclined to join your team if they know they will be supported. Stand by your people, and they will stand by your business.
An article from Forbes highlights this, stating that 87% of employees consider health and wellness packages when choosing and employer. The article also states that more than half of Gen-Zers and Millenials consider company wellness programmes to be important or extremely important when deciding where to work.
Wellness helps in all aspects of business. From recruitment, to retention, attraction, pipelining and productivity, wellness touches on every outlook regarding HR and future talent.
It boils down to this: workplace wellness is here to stay, and if you want a successful wellness programme, let your employees guide the way.
