We need to put the fun back in to employee wellbeing :-). There are two primary reasons for this:

1. Employee wellbeing is a topic that is inherently interesting to most employees and our approach should reflect this and ignite their passion (not kill it);
2. Engagement with employee wellbeing is essential to it being effective and the best way to engage people is for them to enjoy it.

Most people have a natural affinity for wellbeing. Most days, if you listen, you will hear employees’ talking to each other about their wellbeing issues. We hear it most commonly about physical wellbeing – exercise and diet. However, we also hear about it when people discuss money worries, their career, caring for others and their involvement in their local community.

Yet, when many employers try and get involved in employee wellbeing, employees don’t show interest in what they’re pushing. The tragedy of this is that it is often the people who need help the most who shy away from seeking the support that they need from their employer.

There is a tendency within employee wellbeing for it to be dominated by the ‘well’ (or those that think they are). Whilst this is often coming from the right place - people want to help others - it can drive the wrong outcomes as those people push their agenda. As I’ve written about previously, people often take their own personal bias about what wellbeing is and then look to inflict it on others (as evidenced by the complete failure to do anything effective in the UK on mental health issues). This leads employers to promote interventions that they are told are good ideas by well-meaning people, but are actually not engaging for many within their workforce. Employers often double down on this 'top down' mandate for employees to ‘get involved’ (or the ‘tyranny of fun’ approach). Why have your employees’ genuinely engage in an intervention, when you can socially brow beat them in to it instead?

How can we change this dynamic? How can we get employees to genuinely engage in employer led wellbeing initiatives? There are a number of answers, but the key two are: listen to your employees and provide them with a choice.

Listening to your employees is a key to success in any aspect of running your business. An ex-colleague of mine was excellent at focus groups. When employers used to ask what benefits they should offer on their flexible benefits platform, she would tell them that they should ask their employees! Conducting a survey can be difficult, inexperienced practitioners often get the wrong answers and generate unreasonable expectations with their questions. However, a specialist can speak to employees and find out what they really think, delivering this information back to the employer in a meaningful and actionable way. So I watched as my colleague was engaged by a large UK employer to find out what was interesting to their employees. Was it pay? Was it pension? Was it healthcare? No, the main problem that their employees wanted to talk about was parking! By genuinely listening to employees in an unbiased way, we were able to find out their number one concern and tackle it successfully to improve their wellbeing (more car parking options were brought in to improve choice and the main car park was run on a more equitable basis moving forward to ensure that it was fair to everyone). Job done.

In order to genuinely engage people in wellbeing, you have to offer them choice so that they can find something that they actually like. I’ve lost count of the number of business in the UK who mandate their wellbeing solutions to their employees. I could pick almost any popular wellbeing initiative from an extensive list - as failing to engage and not working are the hallmarks of the UK wellbeing industry - however, I will pick on step challenges.

I know a company that runs a three month step challenge every year despite the data on step challenges clearly showing that they don't work. As we all know, step challenges put off anyone who can’t be bothered to engage with walking from the outset (there goes 25-50% of your audience). As they progress, more and more people drop out for a variety of reasons (from just getting bored, to losing the pedometer, to falling too far behind the lead teams in the competition). It is likely that at the end of the challenge, only a small proportion of the employee population that took part is still full taking part. Those that finish the event are normally those who undertake physical activity at the required level regularly anyway, so they have had little to gain.

Rather than waste organisation time and effort on giving those who are already active a pat on the back for 'walking around the world', why not take the time to engage with all of your employees in a way that is meaningful to them? Perhaps use the money to incentivise them with a reward for completing a positive wellbeing activity or goal of their choice? If someone likes golf and wants to use that as their method of exercise, don’t be like me and criticise it as a completely pointless activity for people with too much time on their hands, support them to pursue their own wellbeing passions.

As always, just ensure that whatever you do when engaging with wellbeing with your employees is that it is fun for both them and you, alongside the usual push by me for you to ensure that you apply measurable goals that can help you see if your approach has been a success.