7 Important Reasons to Offer Employee Wellbeing at Work
Mountains of Evidence Show the Benefits and Importance of Well-being at Work
Think of the different benefits employers typically offer. These could include a retirement or pension plan, healthcare, paid time off, or maternity leave. These are designed to help your organization recruit and maintain qualified employees.
Yet there is not a single published study that shows that offering these benefits as any measurable effect on it worksite’s ability to recruit or maintain workers. We do them because we believe they are important.
These things are actually very hard to study and we have a feeling or sense that they do make a difference in our ability to attract good workers. But, there is no science to back any of this up.
Now consider your well-being at work program. Unlike all the other benefits your worksite offers, well-being programs have been studied for decades. There are hundreds and hundreds of rigorous scientific evaluations of the impact of well-being programs. There is more research on the impact of well-being programs than anything else your company does. Granted, the research is not perfect—no research ever is.
7 Most Important Reasons to Offer Employee Well-being at Work
1) Well-being Programs Improve Employee Health Behaviors
How do you improve employee wellbeing? The core of every good well-being program is behavior change. With the right education, skills, motivation, skills/tools, and social support, people change behaviors. Well-being programs are good at helping people adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. This is perhaps the biggest benefit of having a well-being at work program.
2) Well-being Programs Reduce Elevated Health Risks
The foundation of any good well-being program must be focused on helping employees adopt healthy behaviors. Elevated blood glucose, high blood cholesterol, and high blood pressure are almost all caused by unhealthy diets and lack of physical activity. Eating and exercising are behaviors.
3) Well-being Programs Reduce Health Care Costs
Comprehensive worksite well-being programs that improve employee behaviors will see a bending of the healthcare cost trend. Most often they will discover that the savings from program participation will be greater than the actual cost of the program. Almost everyone of these return on investment (ROI) studies show a positive return on investment. Researchers from Harvard recently published another summary of the well-being ROI research.
4) Well-being Programs Improve Productivity
Poor employee productivity can be defined as physically being at work but not working. This type of poor productivity is called presenteeism. It is estimated that the cost associated with presenteeism due to poor employee health is at least 2 to 3 times greater than direct health care expenses.
While the estimated cost of presenteeism dwarfs the cost of health care, it does not receive the same level of scrutiny among employers preoccupied with controlling the direct costs of poor employee health.
5) Well-being Programs Can Decrease Absenteeism
There are over 50 papers that have looked at the connections between worksite well-being programs and reduced absenteeism. Worksites with comprehensive well-being programs can experience reduced absenteeism for a variety of reasons:
Employees with good health behaviors have lower absenteeism.
Employees who can control their stress have lower absenteeism.
Employees with healthy blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose have lower absenteeism.
Employees who are not overweight or obese have lower absenteeism.
6) Well-being Programs Can Help Improve Employee Recruitment and Retention
I confess there is no published scientific data that shows that well-being programs will make a significant impact on your ability to recruit and retain employees. There are a lot of factors that go into the decision to accept a job offer. It helps if you can offer a good salary and a rich benefits plan.
7) Well-being Programs Build and Help Sustain High Employee Morale
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The WellSteps Well-being solutions has a performance guarantee. After three years, we guarantee that your well-being program will have a positive return on investment. The secret is that after three years almost nobody cares about the ROI.
There is an enormous amount of research to support the benefits of well-being. A comprehensive well-being program is going to improve employee health and improve your organization’s bottom line.
It is not going to make all your problems go away, but it is going to help you create a worksite culture of health. It will boost and maintain employee morale. With an effective well-being program, you will improve the lives of your employees and help drive the success of your organization.
References;
https://www.wellsteps.com/blog/2020/01/02/employee-well-being-at-work/