7 Most Important Reason To offer Employee Wellbeing at Work
Employers used to focus on health benefits when talking about employee wellbeing. Nowadays, we know that employee wellbeing is more than just absence of illness among employees.
Employee wellbeing is about optimizing the health of all employees. It is not only about physical wellbeing, but other components of wellbeing that cannot be ignored when talking about healthy and well-functioning individuals or employees.
When done correctly, well-being programs give employees incentives, tools, social support, privacy, and strategies to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors.
Here are some important reason to offer employee wellbeing at work:
1) Well-being Programs Improve Employee Health Behaviors
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 program.
Just about anybody can have healthy behaviors for a few days or weeks. The key is to maintain healthy behaviors for years. As soon as you stop having healthy behaviors you stop getting the benefits.
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
There are nearly 100 different studies that have looked at the financial impact of well-being programs. These studies are not easy to do, they require extremely complicated ROI calculations, and they take years to complete.
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.
However, well-being programs do have a strong impact on retention. Retention is the ability a worksite has to retain its workforce. Rich benefits also have a powerful influence on retention, but a good well-being program can help keep employees loyal.
7) Well-being Programs Build and Help Sustain High Employee Morale
he academic approach to well-being programs has limitations when we start talking about employee morale. As an internal observer, it is easy to see how our own well-being program impacts employee – but it is still difficult to measure and evaluate. Employee morale is a huge factor in the success or failure of any business and a good well-being program helps employees be happy and healthy.
Many of you have probably studied Maslow’s needs hierarchy. The pyramid shown below shows the different needs that we have as humans. The most important and life sustaining needs are the bottom of the pyramid, the base of the pyramid.
These include things like food, water, shelter, social interactions, etc. Without these basic needs being fulfilled we could die or just suffer through life. The top half of the hierarchy shows the kinds of things we’d like to have once our basic needs have been met. Not everyone gets to fulfill these higher needs, and their lives are not as rewarding as they could be.
Furthermore, taking care of physical wellbeing of employees also means providing benefits that will help employees control their ongoing chronic diseases.
In other words, the term of employee wellbeing has expanded from traditional viewpoint and focus on providing medical care to employees. Nowadays, employers are aware of many elements that comprise employee wellbeing and are looking to make their employees happier and healthier.
Reference:
https://www.wellsteps.com/blog/2020/01/02/employee-well-being-at-work/