Is Your Company Backsliding on Employee Well-Being?

The scoop

Many organizations are backtracking on their efforts to support employee well-being. Companies have rescinded work flexibility options, rolled back no-meeting days, trimmed well-being perks, and (gasp!) even stopped offering free coffee.

But with the global economy slumping, budgets tightening, and the White House weeks away from declaring an end to the coronavirus emergency, it just makes sense, right?

Not really.

Many employees are struggling with inflation, job insecurity, and a virtual plague of meetings. (Or is that a plague of virtual meetings?) Worker well-being is generally in tatters. 

Which is not good for companies as well-being is strongly correlated with productivity, innovation, and retention.

New report says the problem is much bigger than retracted perks

A recent report from Deloitte, “The Workforce Well-Being Imperative,” notes that while 80% of executives say well-being is a top priority, nearly 90% of employees say their work life is getting worse. Some 57% of employees and, strikingly, 70% of execs say they’re considering quitting to go to an org that will better support their well-being.

The Deloitte report concludes that well-being is a systemic problem that requires systemic solutions. So, while it’s a bummer about all the free fitness classes, massages, and cups of joe that have recently vanished, they were not likely to restore well-being on their own. “Although the intentions may be good,” Deloitte says, “little progress can be made if the root causes of poor workforce well-being are not addressed.”

Among the suggestions Deloitte makes for attacking root causes:

• Take a hard look at meetings. Workers are spending 250% more time in meetings than before the pandemic, so consider what tasks your team can accomplish asynchronously. If you must meet, this course shares tips for running effective hybrid meetings.
• Consider team well-being as a core competency to embed in leaders’ performance reviews. Of course, this raises the question of what can be done to support leaders. As a start, Deloitte suggests, offer managers training in empathy and psychological safety.
• Empower workers to decide which flexibility-related work norms may be best for them. Rethink mandatory return to office. Rather than make employees commute, give them time back to work out, to relax, to check in with family and friends.

The single-most important thing companies can do, however, is to take seriously the title of Deloitte’s report, “The Workforce Well-Being Imperative,” and pursue employee well-being not as a nice-to-have but as the organizational must-have it is.

By the numbers

The last word

“I see employers and employees sometimes moving in opposite directions — with some employers trying to return to an old normal while employees increasingly insist on a new paradigm.”

– Naz Beheshti, CEO of Prananaz and author of Pause. Breathe. Choose., writing in Forbes

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