You can almost imagine the radio advert now: “So what does employee wellbeing mean to you?” 

A diverse group of voices from a company pitch in, with the light jingle playing in the background.

“For me it’s financial wellbeing, ensuring mine and my family’s finances are in order”

“My mental health is my priority. Full stop.” 

“Well, I’ve just taken up yoga and I’m eating more healthily, and generally I’m feeling better” 

None of these answers are wrong, or less important than the other. A key point that we need to acknowledge is that ’employee wellbeing’ commonly covers each of the following dimensions/themes: Physical, social, financial, emotional/mental, spiritual and occupational wellbeing.

In my previous article on employee wellbeing, I discussed how wellbeing for many organisations is still just treated as a ‘perk’ and how provision is currently falling short. Judging by the comments and feedback, this article resonated with many of you.

So I wanted to dig a little deeper here…

Again, to clarify; this is drawing upon my work in high performance sporting organisations across Europe over the last 15 years, and more recently the work of our consultancy with different businesses within financial services, technology, utilities and luxury goods, sectors.

Covering all the bases

So let’s start by taking a step back to assess the current wellbeing landscape…

The first challenge is the sheer number of themes which fall under the current ‘umbrella’ of wellbeing.

With all of these competing wellbeing priorities, is it then any wonder that the current workplace default is to opt for a full selection of wellbeing ‘perks’ to cover all bases. This demand for light-touch support has led to supply of many light-touch offerings; wellbeing weeks, one-off talks and wellbeing hubs on a company’s intranet. All with very limited evidence that these corporate wellness initiatives currently work.

The second challenge is that most wellbeing initiatives operate in silo: Employees opt into the initiatives that interest them. Now this might be fine for learning about financial wellbeing, but it’s nowhere near sufficient for employees to learn the tools to improve their and health and performance, across different disciplines.

This unfortunately means that the initiatives targeting the health and performance of employees is falling short. How do I know this? Well, each day I see how these are applied with high performance sport, where the health and performance of athletes is of prime performance, and the outcomes are measured.

In my opinion, the wellbeing industry really needs to do have a close look at what is being delivered and how this is structured…

Interdisciplinary

Taking the model from high performance sport, there are a number of disciplines that support an athlete’s mind and body, to sustain health, energy and performance over long and often gruelling seasons.

The most common that transfer from sport into business include;

Psychology – tools to manage mental (cognitive) demands 

Nutrition – to fuel brain and body according to the daily demands 

Exercise – activity to maintain brain and body 

Sleep/recovery – to adapt and regenerate following the days cognitive workload

But here’s the key word. Interdisciplinary. These services have to be interdisciplinary, as there is significant overlap between all of them. 

Within a sports organisation, each specialist practitioner discusses their programmes and how these disciplines link together as part of an overall programme, working towards a performance goal.

And it should be exactly the same within a business.

There needs to be cohesion with the approach: shared language, the coaching/delivery style used (e.g. guided discovery – allowing employees to learn and test/refine the tools).

Having a ‘tapas selection’ initiatives/products could be causing more harm than good, unless these are working together in an interdisciplinary way. Without this cohesion, services are likely pull in different directions, creating an extra layer of friction for employees.

A clearer structure

To be clear, I’m not proposing that this should be the end of wellbeing. 

But I believe that there urgently needs to be a separate definition/department for employee health and performance, and there needs to be capital ring-fenced for this.

This can either sit alongside or under the overarching wellbeing umbrella. 

Investing in health and performance won’t deliver return instantly, or perhaps significantly in the short term, but when embedded consistently will compound in value over time.

To stress, the organisations that are doing this well, are slowly and sustainably building a culture, that is apparent each day:

Shared language around health and performance.

Peer support/coaching within the office environment (supporting and also holding each other to account).

Physical work environment with ‘nudges’ to support employee health objectives and growth for the long term. Rather than just keeping employees happy with an endless supply of comfort food/sweet treats (which ironically is in direct conflict to these goals).

This culture is slowly developed through consistent ongoing strategic support, through individual consultations or focus group education sessions with competency-based outcomes (at each level of the company).

As I previously mentioned, impact needs to be measured, and should form part of a longer-term roadmap, to build the right culture within the organisation.

Circling back to the title, across the industry there need to be a significant shift in how health and performance services are structured and delivered, if employers really want to see their talent reach their potential.

Next time I’ll be exploring potential models for this…

As always – if this article resonates with you, let me know.

James