How workplace wellbeing is playing a leading role in corporate culture

It used to be said that happy workplaces are productive workplaces. But the same is certainly true of healthy workplaces. That’s why leading employers are taking steps to promote healthier workplaces and to look after the physical health and wellbeing of their staff.

The pandemic put health and wellbeing top of mind for all of us but the rise in workplace wellbeing began long before Covid arrived, says Mary Connaughton, director of CIPD Ireland, the professional body for human resources practitioners.

“What the pandemic did was to put it centre stage,” she explains.

Today workplace wellness is seen as an important part of company culture. “For senior leaders it’s about how do we make wellness part of what we do. It has expanded from focusing on things like physical activity and fruit at lunch to initiatives such as menopause and miscarriage supports, which 20 per cent of companies now offer,” she says.

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More recently still employers have responded to the cost-of-living crisis by introducing financial wellbeing programmes, providing education around topics such as the benefits of saving, budgeting and reducing electrical usage. “Under the banner of education it’s about helping people to better manage their lives,” she explains.

It’s not just large multinational organisations that are doing it, but businesses of all sizes and types. This is driven by realisation that these initiatives are often inexpensive to provide. In the case of financial wellbeing initiatives for example, financial advisers are typically willing to talk to groups for free.

“Ten years ago there were a lot of conversations about whether or not employee wellbeing was an employer’s concern or not. Those conversations aren’t happening any more because there is an acceptance that this is what employers have to do,” says Connaughton.

“There is also much more education and awareness generally about things like mental health, the importance of taking breaks and not sitting at a desk all day. It is accepted that performance is undermined otherwise, so it has become part and parcel of how organisations operate.”

Employer body IBEC’s Keep Well programme was launched in 2017. The programme focuses on key areas of workplace wellbeing ranging from leadership, mental health and absence management to physical activity and healthy eating.

On joining the programme, organisations receive a framework of standards in all areas of workplace wellbeing, tools to benchmark their performance and invitations to Keep Well community events and clinics for best practice sharing and expert advice. Having a Keep Well Mark accreditation can help an organisation position itself as an employer of choice.

Earlier this year the Government moved the dial further with the publication of the Healthy Ireland workplace wellbeing framework. It aims to support the growth of effective approaches to enhancing health and wellbeing in the workplace, as part of its wider Healthy Ireland agenda.

Among other aims the initiative seeks to position health and wellbeing within workplace culture; ensure workers are safe and recognises that mental health is core to health and wellbeing.

Currently 32 per cent of workplaces in Ireland have a formal health and wellbeing strategy, with 84 per cent offering an employee assistance programme, 45 per cent providing mental health support, and 44 per cent having on-site wellbeing initiatives.

A key objective of the Healthy Ireland workplace wellbeing framework has been to share good practice in the form of case studies from public, private, for-profit and not-for-profit organisations.

For example, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly reported it had taken a number of steps to promote workplace wellbeing, including gaining management commitment and employee engagement for it, identifying what was important to employees and what was already being done in the wellbeing space.

It then developed a holistic, integrated wellbeing programme with an annual calendar of wellbeing events, using data from its employee assistance programme to help identify priority areas.

Low- or no-cost initiatives were used, including external low-cost awareness programmes offered by charities such as the Irish Cancer Society, Irish Heart Foundation and Pieta House. Collaboration with the company’s health insurer also provided supports for events.

Outcomes included an increase in physical activity among employees, lower absenteeism and better talent attraction and retention.

Similar initiatives at the CSO led to a culture of health and wellbeing becoming embedded in the organisation. It also provided reputational benefits, as the organisation was able to use its wellbeing initiatives to promote itself as an employer of choice.

ICE Group, a recruitment, training and outsourced HR and payroll business which employs 60 people, has taken the radical step of introducing a four-day week as a way of best maintaining employee wellness.

According to director Margaret Cox, its formal introduction in June 2020 helped promote employee engagement and ensured staff had the “energy, resilience and focus” to cope with a pandemic that saw the business busier than ever.

The four-day working week is just one of a number of wellness initiatives undertaken by the group. The overall outcomes of include, in addition to an improvement in employee wellness overall, a reduction in absenteeism, increased productivity and an “enhanced culture of positivity”, says Cox.

Some fear this newfound awareness of the importance of employee wellness could dissipate in the event of a softening labour market.

Not so, believes Connaughton. “It has become part of how organisations operate. It is now part of the landscape and has become embedded in so far as these initiatives add value to the bottom line and there is now enough evidence to prove it,” she says.

“What might get hit, in the event of a downturn, is budgets. However, the cost of these initiatives to employers is not necessarily high. Large-scale programmes might be cut back but there are a lot of things employers can do that are not expensive, such as setting targets for teams to walk a certain number of kilometres and making a competition of that.”

If anything, the move to more distributed workforces, where people work from home some or all of the time, is helping to drive workplace wellbeing initiatives. For employers, “in a hybrid working world, bringing people together for wellbeing purposes is a demonstration of culture,” she points out.