Improving the Wellbeing and Resilience of Employees in the Life Sciences Sector

It probably sounds like a broken record when I say that organizations need to ensure the wellbeing and resilience of their workforce so it is capable of adapting to change – but it’s true.

Indeed, for the industry I’m looking at in this article – Life Sciences – the one ‘constant’ is volatility. This makes it all the more critical for companies in this sector to have a resilient workforce.

As employee needs, skills and behaviors evolve, it’s vital for employers to invest in building a workforce that can effectively navigate new challenges and opportunities. When resilience increases, so does client satisfaction, profit margin, innovation and employee retention.

It’s a win-win situation.

Building resilience takes time, however, and requires all aspects of employee wellbeing to be addressed, including physical, social, mental and emotional, work/life and financial needs. It also means developing a human-centered employee value proposition (EVP) where an employer’s values, culture, policies and benefits provide a positive employee experience.

Sector-specific workforce resilience challenges

Given the space Life Sciences operate in, which is patient-focused and mission-driven, the sector does a pretty good job at having a ‘people-first’ mentality. That said, every sector has its challenges – and Life Sciences isn’t exempt. The challenge will depend on a range of factors – often specific to that industry.

For that reason, we decided to take a deep dive into the workforce resilience risk profiles for a range of sectors (starting with Life Sciences) to discover (a) what the main challenges are and (b) to offer practical advice to overcome them.

Our methodology

How did we work out the risk profiles?

• Firstly, we analyzed holistic HR data from over 3,000 companies globally
• We then asked 1,700 HR leaders to complete a workforce resilience risk assessment
• Finally, we surveyed 1,300 companies about their specific workforce wellbeing priorities

Using this unique data, we discovered that:

• The workforce resilience risk profile for Life Sciences shows that the greatest deficit is between the physical and mental health of their employees compared to other industries
• This is accompanied by an unmet demand for skilled employees, squeezing the talent pipeline
• Highly skilled workers with scientific expertise, industry acumen and digital skills are in both short supply and high demand
• High levels of digitalization are being infused into the sector, which in turn is making employers look closely to see if they have those technical skills (AI, machine learning, data scientist) internally and/or can they build/grow the skills quickly enough
• If not, they need to buy/recruit talent from tech companies, which in turn means competing against a different EVP and total rewards philosophy generally
• 71% of Life Sciences companies planned to increase their workforce in 2022, with over a third increasing their employee numbers by over 15%. While there was some pause on aggressive hiring, generally the industry has not seen as much in terms of RIFs, layoffs, etc
• While the economy is of course hindering valuations, the strategy of the Life Sciences industry as a whole is to continue to grow/advance at a decent pace
• Despite this planned growth, the industry still faces unstable talent pipelines, with 78% of the companies we surveyed attributing rising turnover rates to better career opportunities elsewhere, and 77% to higher pay
• These organizations are constantly competing with businesses who offer better career progression and financial reward

Pain point 1

Ensuring the wellbeing of your employees

We all know that businesses across the board are facing unprecedented uncertainty and volatility, with inflation, fears of a recession and workforce erosion just a few things weighing on their minds. Life Sciences is no different.

With that in mind, you might imagine that employee wellbeing has decreased in importance. But that’s absolutely not the case. Quite the opposite in fact – as Aon’s recent Global Wellbeing Survey shows, most organizations (80%) are actually increasing their investment in the wellbeing of their employees.

Is the Life Science sector keeping up? Does it acknowledge the fact that, compared to other industries, it is falling behind on protecting the physical and mental health of its employees? It needs to take action now.

Potential Solutions

As mentioned above, while we are seeing many more organizations spending on wellbeing, what we really need to see – and what we are encouraging businesses to do – is the spend being aligned with actual needs.

This can be achieved in many ways, but likely a journey and a combination of actions and interventions. One example, as deployed recently by a client, involved:

• A diagnostic and analysis of total rewards and perception of these rewards
• The use of personas (or groupings of like individuals) to tailor rewards to needs
• Psychometric assessments with demographic data and tools like our Human Sustainability to help your employees understand and therefore manage their own risk areas; this also provides team views of human sustainability, plus and organization wide heat maps of risk areas and strengths

Pain point 2

Can you afford to continue to pay new hire premiums?

Companies have been paying excessive new hire premiums to secure hot talent over the last two years. Tech is laying many people off, but what happens when they start hiring again? How will you retain your talent?

We have observed a pushback in those industry new hire premiums, but for some companies, their pain point now is dealing with the aftermath of having hired in newer talent at premiums and trying to now ’fix’ internal inequities.

Potential Solutions

Pay benchmarking based on Radford data and doubling down on a clear and compelling EVP that helps cement the purpose for teams and individuals is a good place to start. As roles now change far quicker, mobility and agility have become the norm.

Job architecture is also coming under review and is an area where Aon is doing a huge amount of work helping Life Science companies at the moment. An added incentive is that this helps address pay equity and pay transparency, which in turn can help improve equality (now being viewed as a business goal, not just an HR goal).

So, ensure you have up-to-date benchmark data for what is really going on in your industry. Getting objective insights into who is on the move, how much the movers are getting, and what companies are planning to offer in terms of raises, bonuses, incentives and other benefits will be crucial to understand.

Pain point 3

Are you ready for a possible 25% increase in your healthcare premiums?

National health providers are under pressure, exhausted and overspent post-pandemic. Private medical insurance is seeing a sharp uptake, with more people making more claims. We predict an increase in premiums of up to 25% - can you afford that? How does one look at this in the context of an overall total rewards picture?

Potential Solutions

We are seeing innovative solutions involving clusters of similar individuals (personas) to help customize the total reward offerings in a manageable way. By using data (an Aon strong point) as the ‘engine’ to power a personalized approach to rewards and benefits and wellbeing, HR leaders can ensure employees are agile and better equipped to adapt in a way where the admin is manageable and the cost acceptable (to start the journey in a manageable way towards customized total rewards).

Pain point 4

Remote, hybrid, on-site?

With multiple generations in the workforce – plus a more complex hybrid working model in Life Science companies, where many positions in laboratories or manufacturing don’t have that flexibility – many companies are trying to figure out how to make an attractive EVP for new candidates and existing employees, all of which differ in what they value from an employer.

?Potential Solutions

It’s clear that a ‘one size fits all’ approach no longer works. Organizations need to have customized value propositions and benefits (perhaps as we outlined in point 1 aligned to a number of representative personas).

An important factor for Life Sciences companies in particular is ensuring their mission driven cultures are still strong in the new working model. We would also recommend looking at pay practices to ensure equity.

Next steps

Like all sectors, Life Sciences has huge challenges ahead. Tackling the physical/mental health challenges of employees, PLUS as tackling the cost/recruitment challenges will not be easy. But it must be done.

I hope this article has gone some way towards making those challenges clearer and, more importantly, that the solutions I’ve put forward will prove helpful.

If you are leading a Life Science business and would like to have a one-to-one chat with me or my colleagues such as Meaghan Piscitelli and Lars Sorensen, please feel free to reach out to us - our virtual doors are always open!

(Also, if you’d like to read more about building a resilient workforce across a range of business sectors, our recent paper entitled ‘Building a Resilient Workforce That Steers Organizational Success - An Outlook Across Industries’ may interest you. There’s a link to it in the comments section).