"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a 
human face – forever"        

This is one of the most famous quotations from George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Every now and then, someone appears in the news that reminds anyone in HR or Wellbeing why they do what they do. Recently it's been a CEO firing people via Zoom or a leader asking their people to stop complaining about bonuses while taking a 4 million bonus themselves. But today, it's a CEO who called out and celebrated an employee who sold their dog because of the new company policy to return each employee back to the office. This on the back of a message delivered to staff just a few months ago reassuring them that no mandate to in-office working was forthcoming.

The CEO of an Utah-based digital marketing and technology company celebrated the sacrifice of an employee who had to sell the family dog as a result of his decisions. To me, this raises the question of how much work should interfere with an employees home life? Many relationships have failed because of work. Many marriages have ended because of poor work life balance and many people have died just because of the job they do. If work stops us from living the life we want to, what is the point of working at all?

Despite all of our efforts over the last few years, people continue to work in a slump. Employee engagement is still not where it should - or needs - to be.

By early 2022, U.S. employee engagement slumped to a seven-year low with 32% of employees engaged and 17% actively disengaged at work. The slump continued throughout 2022 as engagement levels remained relatively unchanged. But for those who made great strides in improving employee engagement, they are weathering these storms well.

Wellbeing and employee engagement are very close siblings and so it's no surprise to see that while engagement remains low, so does wellbeing. Three in 10 employees in the U.S. report being burned out “very often” or “always” at work. Four in 10 employees revealed that their job had a negative impact on their mental health in the past six months and individuals with poor/fair mental health miss nearly five times as many days of work as those with good mental health.

If you took the graph showing organisations investment in wellbeing, the number of workplace wellbeing companies and overlaid them, you'd see a very definite line upwards from the bottom left to the top right. If you then overlaid a graph of the nation's wellbeing, you'd see a line going the opposite way. Despite the huge attention and investment in wellbeing, we aren't making too much of a dent in it. Part of the reason for this is that societal changes and pressures (multiple crises, shrinking economies etc) are adding more to our pile. Its almost like watching employers plug holes in their boat while down the other end The Government is shooting holes in it.

The point of this newsletter is that change is slow - no-one knows that better than HR. Things take time, wellbeing can take time to recover. So stick with it, we must keep on pushing and not let ourselves get dragged down by seeing slow movement. It's like opening a jar, you might not see any changes for a few minutes, but the continued effort and pressure will eventually produce results.

For every employer pushing their boot down on the face of an employee, there are twice as many trying not to do that and helping their people get back on their feet. Wellbeing at work is still a new concept and one that is pushing back against centuries of the old ways.