How to Sell Wellbeing to the C-Suite

Follow our 3-part strategy to turn your wellbeing programmes into a central organising principle

Employee wellbeing enables core business objectives. In the UK alone, health costs are typically the largest people expense after salary and yet an abundance of data shows that high employee well-being boosts engagement and staff retention, lowers turnover and absenteeism, improves customer service and product quality, and leads to higher profits, and even higher shareholder value!

Yet, despite the evidence, many boards still see employee wellbeing as merely a “nice to have”.

So How Can You Help?

Educate and persuade your board that employee well-being is worth their time and investment

Unlike wellness programs that focus on losing weight, quitting smoking and lowering blood pressure, well-being goes much further by focusing not just on physical health but other drivers of wellbeing.

Given that stress is the leading cause of absence in the UK (and an underlying factor for many other physical illnesses), a wellbeing programme looks at other drivers which impact our emotional and mental health. These include things which cause stress in the workplace – organisational, management and you as an individual.

Use some facts below to help you present your case:

Moral

As senior leaders in organisations, most of us want to provide happy places to work, often wellbeing can be tied in with our other values for example customer satisfaction or sustainability.

Financial

– A leading cause of sickness absence worldwide is stress. Anxiety has hugely risen during the pandemic

– Training our managers in managing a well, thriving team makes sense because teams which display psychological safety are more productive, engaged and creative

Legal

– Prevention of stress sits in OHS law worldwide. In the UK The Health and Safety at Work Act says that employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by doing a risk assessment and acting on it

– Managers and HR teams need to know that Disability Discrimination sits in HR law all over the world. In this is in UK the Equalities Act 2010

Present quick wins where well-being can meet immediate goals and challenges and crucially deliver ROI

There will usually be an area you just know you need training.

This might be in giving your Board a session “get your board on board”, it might be training your managers to spot the signs of someone struggling and have a wellbeing conversation or it might be supporting your staff in current issues you know they are struggling with for example Burnout or Dealing with Stress, Uncertainty and Worry at work.

Use these wins and new knowledge as a launchpad for increasing support for comprehensive well-being programs that deliver longer-term results

Now that you’ve started to get buy in to why you need to invest, brainstorm with the board to consider how you can get the information you need from your employees as to where to put your efforts next.

There are many touch points in which you can gain this information. It may be your HR Engagement or Pulse surveys, you may be producing a stress risk assessment, you may have manager or HR input into where people are struggling at the moment. You may need to review your policies and procedures, but more likely you will need to train your people. You need to consider these areas of training:

BUT DON’T FORGET… that employee well-being is a long-term strategy. It needs to become central to the company mission, management decisions, and operating processes with the goal of cultivating a supportive workplace culture that permanently reduces turnover, increases engagement and results in better customer service.

If you would like to know more about any of programmes, click here to contact the team.