Wellbeing, or wellness, has become one of the most searched terms for leaders and managers over the past three years, and for good reason. The Covid-19 pandemic had organizations scrambling to provide assistance for employees who were suddenly required to stay out of shuttered office spaces, while juggling home demands and learning just how difficult it is to join a Zoom meeting without being on mute.

Ad hoc solutions, virtual stretch classes, and Zoom meditation all became part of the landscape for employees and their employers, but were they effective? A recent study from Mental Health Research Canada indicates that one quarter of Canadians remain exhausted and burnt-out, I would say no, they were not effective.

So if you are in a position to create, or refresh, your organization’s wellbeing strategy: congratulations. What an exciting time to have the spotlight shone upon you! And also, I’m here to help. First I’ll unpack what wellbeing means, then give you a step by step, research-backed approach to creating an effective wellbeing strategy.

We will need to make a number of assumptions in this series of articles. The first and most important is that your organization is open and ready for change. I will leave that statement vague for now, as the concept of “readiness” is highly individual. Our second assumption is that the culture that exists in your place of work is not toxic. I will provide more information about company culture and psychological safety in future articles, but for now if your company is generally positive, that is a great place to start.

First things first. You will not be creating your strategy in a vacuum, or alone. You will need input from various parts of your organization, starting with:

Step One: Leadership Support

If you have your leadership team supporting your wellbeing strategy, you will have a much higher chance of success. The number one reason that employees leave their job is organizational culture, and we know that culture begins at the top. Some members of your executive leadership may initially be skeptical about a strategy for wellbeing; after all, employees aren’t being paid to take yoga classes and sit around meditating all day. Provide some statistics relevant to your industry/location/employee population around mental health issues, short term disability claims (ask your vendor for case studies), musculoskeletal claims, etc. These areas are where poor wellbeing - across an employee population - show up. 

Ask the leadership team for their list of what’s important to them: what do they want for and from the employees of the company? This will be valuable information to consider as you begin to structure your wellbeing strategy. Do not rush this step: all future strategic moves will be driven by the choices you make here, so give this step the time and respect it deserves.

Step Two: Define Wellbeing

You will need to engage multiple stakeholders to holistically define wellbeing within your organization. A truly effective wellbeing strategy will consider the entire employee experience, and therefore needs the voices of all parts of your business. Consider engaging with talent acquisition, IT, HR, DEI, Learning, Change Management, and of course, the employees themselves. Now that you have your major stakeholders identified, it’s time to reach out to them. The way you do this is up to you; the structure of your organization, and how communications between teams and departments work, is unique to your company, so use whatever means are available to you.

Every company, and possibly, each branch of the company, will have its own definition of wellbeing, based on a few factors, including:

• What are the company’s values? A great place to start to understand employee wellbeing is to understand what the organization values.
• What is the mission statement? This should tell you about where the company’s priorities lie.
• What is our company culture? This is highly individual and subjective, but is also valuable information to have, as an organization’s culture is closely aligned with its employees’ wellbeing.

With the above questions as a starting point, ask your stakeholders to provide answers. This is your first phase of research: trying to understand what keeps your business moving forward.

With the information you’ve gathered, now you are able to identify the areas of wellbeing that are most relevant to your company. Some organizations may have three, four or more areas of wellbeing that they focus on. Some areas you include may be: physical and mental wellbeing, and you may discover others, like: cultural, financial, social, spiritual, community, etc.

Once you have chosen your areas of focus, it’s time to move on.

Step Three: Stakeholder Alignment

Marketers do market research to discover what particular pain points may exist in a consumer’s life, and then they work to ease or remove that pain point with their product or service. Wellbeing needs to do the same.

At this stage, you’ll need to circle back to your stakeholders with the wellbeing areas you know will be the most impactful to your organization. Ask your stakeholders if what they are looking at feels right. Do the areas you’ve chosen (based on feedback from the same stakeholders) address the issues your stakeholders are feeling? This is a great opportunity to not only test the work, but to engage once again with those individuals and teams within your company that will be pivotal in helping you champion your new wellbeing strategy. They will appreciate the care and attention you are showing, and by enlisting their opinions early you will be better positioned to ask for the continuing support once you are ready to roll out your strategy.

Step Four: Data Collection

You will want to collect data on where your employee population’s health and wellbeing is currently, so you’re able to look back and reflect on whether your strategy has helped move the needle on employee wellbeing.

Consider tracking metrics through different avenues. Focus groups and surveys probably already exist in your organization: can you include some wellbeing-specific questions on those surveys? Look at short and long term disability claims. Look at mental health issues: what percentage of your workforce is living with an identified mental health issue? Do changes to the mental health strategy, as part of your larger wellbeing strategy, make a difference in those numbers over time? Physical data, so critical in a manufacturing environment, can be tracked. Musculoskeletal claims, injuries, and more can be traced back to the way that work is set up. Consider sleep hygiene and its direct effect on safety and wellbeing. Each organization will have its own set of concerns, and ways to identify, track and measure them, as part of the larger HR oversight.

In part two of this series, we look at next steps: the actual creation of the wellbeing strategy. Any additional considerations that have worked in your company? Leave your thoughts below!