TEN THINGS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE AND APPROACH TO WORKPLACE WELLNESS

Wellness is one of the most misunderstood parts of the responsibilities normally assigned to human resources. It gets sidelined and deprioritized. It is critical to the future health of your organization but rarely gets attention. The starting point is often that you, a dedicated senior human resources professional, believe that your highest priority is working in the best interest of your employees and you are already doing the best you can, within your budget and mandate. I am going to question that premise and ask that you look at your wellness programs and evaluate them in terms of cost, maintenance, and optimum performance or human functionality.

1) THE MEDICAL SYSTEM IS NOT A HEALTH SYSTEM

When the government of The Province of British Columbia announced its latest budget it allocated C$21 billion dollars or about 35% of the total provincial budget to the health sector. The majority of that budget has absolutely nothing to do with health. The entire apparatus is geared towards your care in the event of ill health, sickness, and accidental or acute care for broken people. This creates a fundamental problem with the perception of health and who is looking after it. It is a key step in the journey of deciding who should be caring for your employees' health. This becomes more critical as companies are becoming increasingly responsible for the costs incurred when employees reach failure points.

Company protocols are directed from several different organizations including the Canadian Labour Code, Ministry of Labour, Public Health Office, Employment Standards & workplace safety (WorkSafeBC, workers' comp, labour relations etc), Canadian Human Rights and more recently BC Centre for Disease Control. All of these organizations are in place to protect the health of our workers but are fundamentally used when an employee is no longer healthy. 

The common belief that the medical system is in charge of your health stops you asking the questions that might lead you to implement programs and resources to maintain your employees at optimum functionality.

2) WELLNESS IS ABOUT FUNCTIONALITY 

The wellness industry has exploded in response to the deteriorating health of our population. The huge increase in our pharmaceutical and medical capabilities has resulted in a system that can maintain you in various states of dis-health for extended periods of time. The quality and functionality of that survival is more questionable as we focus on masking the symptoms and repairing breakages while often lowering quality and functionality of our lives in the process.  

The increasing number of alternative wellness therapies and modalities has made the entire industry seem like the resurgence of those seedy profiteers of yesteryear selling an unsuspecting public yet another cure-all for life eternal from the back of a wagon. I am not suggesting employers pay for the newest fad or restorative elixir. I am suggesting we start thinking about employee functionality and support improvements to their attendance, performance and engagement.

You can call it wellness, but it is really about keeping expensive key operational units fully functional throughout their lifespan.   

3) UNDERSTANDING MAINTENANCE PROGRAMS

As a senior human resources professional you have an in-depth and highly specialized knowledge of your company and its goals. You often liaise with your colleagues on the operations side regarding return to work and accommodations for employees but may not ask them about their maintenance programs. Operations people have a very different view on how to maintain the health of their equipment. Whether it be a car, a building or a printing press it will have some kind of maintenance protocol to maintain optimum functionality. Operations can follow several different philosophies based on personal preference or company goals and mandates. It is worth asking your senior operations people what they believe is the best, or least expensive, approach to maintaining operational effectiveness.

Maintenance programs can be separated into Preventive or Corrective programs. The corrective style is generally wait until the equipment breaks and then fix it or replace it. This is often called a Run To Failure (RTF) program and can be very effective for light bulbs and ball point pens. The preventive category is a little more complex but can be broken down to Time Based (scheduled maintenance), Condition Based (measuring wear etc), Predictive (most likely to fail areas) and Failure Finding (regular testing). All of the preventative measures can be adapted and adopted into the human performance cycle. 

The unfortunate outcome of not accepting responsibility for the health of your employees is that you are now using the run to failure system which creates more work and more costs for the organization. Even the predictive system is often a blanket policy that covers hotspots like sleep, nutrition, and addiction but does not apply directly to the individual and often overlooks a slowly failing employee's particular needs.

Talk to your operations people and compare budgets for preventive maintenance on their equipment compared to your people maintenance, and then look at the costs incurred by using a run to failure system for your people. Stop treating your people like lightbulbs.

4) WELLNESS IS A FEELING AND HEALTH IS A STATE

It is usually easy to recognize someone who is unhealthy, but many people believe that the opposite of unhealthy is obviously healthy. This creates the situation that we tend to ignore our own health and those of others until we become broken or unhealthy which is often a decade too late. 

We tend to ignore our own health and those of others until we become broken or unhealthy which is often a decade too late. 

The World Health Organization clarifies this misunderstanding by defining health as: a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Wellness carries an even higher standard of care as it encompasses your complete social, emotional, spiritual, environmental, occupational, intellectual, and physical wellbeing. An employee who has support to achieve an optimal level of wellness is going to be a highly effective part of your organization at whatever level they contribute.

Healthy employees have clear personal goals and a sense of purpose. They feel good about themselves and the teams they work with. They have effective emotional regulation and work to build supportive, effective relationships. They employ high level mindset strategies to manage mental health. They add value to themselves and everyone around them. With a population like this, the organization requires less resources for the growing issues around managing chronic disease and absenteeism.

5) YOU HAVE NO METRICS TO INDICATE SUCCESS

Because health is such an individual experiential event (until you reach a point of failure) it is difficult to create metrics to measure the success of any wellness program you adopt. This is made even harder because of our natural ability to withstand stress. We can survive years with poor sleep, no exercise and terrible nutrition before our bodies eventually tap out.

Unfortunately the outcome from a first rate wellness/maintenance program is absolutely nothing happens...except your people have a better sense of purpose and enjoy coming to work to add value and support their colleagues and team mates. It decreases absenteeism, lowers presenteeism and makes your organization a place full of healthy balanced caring people. From a successful maintenance POV you will see improved runtime, better productivity and less downtime.

Care for your people and they will care for you is an easy thing to say, and a much harder road to walk and measure. 

6) YOUR BUDGET SHOWS HOW MUCH YOU CARE

Human resources departments tend to separate responsibilities depending on the size of the organization. The wellness (human preventative maintenance) portfolio is usually a small part of Health and Safety, Occupational Health or Human Resources. The budget for wellness is generally one of the more limited budgets and is often a ‘nice to have’ rather than ‘mission critical.’ 

A large majority of an organization's health and safety resources goes towards tangible and measurable factors like regulatory training and equipment with the objective being to avoid acute injuries. Considerable energy is spent managing the symptoms of chronic illness and absenteeism. Both are costly in terms of time, people, and money.

If you look at your wellness budget, it is mostly being spent on wellness perks and limited-impact lunch and learns, thus it is not going to tackle the ever-growing costs that chronic illness and absenteeism are going to throw at you. Most organizations do not have a senior person tasked to or measured by the effectiveness of the wellness program; it is typically relegated to junior staff and limited to pleasant, nice to have, conversations. 

7) YOU HAVE NO CLEAR MANDATE OR DESIRED OUTCOME

Most companies have some verbiage in their mission statement that demonstrates their commitment to the well being and health of their people, but the vast majority believe that their responsibility is limited to the confines of the workplace.

Human resources is a high stress area, complicated by multiple moving parts that create continual pain points. When it comes to wellness, you have a vague directive to supply a wellness component to your already difficult role. If your organization doesn’t have a clear written mandate for its wellness goals, with metrics, they don’t happen.

Here is an example of a clear mandate without the fluffy wellness wording:

To create positive behavioural changes in your employees' lifestyles using individualized education and support.

The goal of wellness is to delay the onset of chronic disease, shorten the period of time they are sick, and to increase their length of life (all of which will increase employee engagement and decrease absenteeism).

The key areas of physical focus include: functional movement, maintenance of muscle mass, and freedom from pain. Mentally it is optimal to: maintain executive function, processing speed and short term memory.

8) THE EMPLOYER DOES NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY

The relative view of our health is generally based in how we feel and how our bodies adapt to new normals. This is great for being comfortable and adjusting to the slow decline of our physical and mental capabilities, but wellness is about understanding that delaying the onset of chronic disease requires understanding and the motivation to fight against that inevitable decline.

According to the Canadian Community Health Survey 2015-2018: 

57% of working adults in British Columbia are either overweight or obese, 70% eat less fruit and vegetables than needed, 24% are considered heavy alcohol users, 15 % still smoke and 30% don’t get enough exercise.

The same survey asked working British Columbians how they felt about their health and less than 8% believed that they were in poor health.

We have very limited perception of our own health

We can all see the effects of unhealthy lifestyles around us but we tend to avoid engagement in difficult conversations about health with colleagues who, like us, are often examples of living the classic boiling frog fable. Our health fades without us noticing and we live by the belief that if it ain't broke, why fix it.

It is easy to say an employee's health is up to them, but if they do not have the knowledge or understanding to make long-term healthy decisions, the costs for that lack of knowledge will be carried by the employer.

9) IMPROVING HEALTH IS INDIVIDUAL AND EXPERIENTIAL 

You look at your wellness plans and they are mostly passive and/or resource driven. You have information on how to get help for issues as they arise (usually through external employee and family assistance programs) and then you sit back and wait for employees to approach you for help. 

I was chatting to a senior executive about coaching last week and his view was that he has the sole responsibility of coaching, leading and mentoring his staff. He backed that up with an example of an employee problem he had recently solved. While he is great at his job, he didn’t see that his role is about keeping the processes running smoothly and intelligently dealing with problems as they are presented. We are all hurried and stressed and being asked to take on more work and responsibilities in the same timeframe, and against this background it is easy to say, "well I am doing more than some companies or I’m doing the best I can considering…"

Unfortunately the majority of employees will not reach out until they have a problem that they are no longer able to cope with. In many cases the employee's peers and managers will all say, “ oh yeah, we saw that coming” or “right, I noticed a performance or attendance drop off.” A good attendance management system should be part of any organization's preventative maintenance program. Once in place, an attendance management program can be used very effectively to identify employees who may be struggling. Be mindful though, some companies use them to manage problem employees rather than to help employees with problems. 

10) YOU ARE A MANAGER... NOT SUPERWOMAN/MAN/PERSON

Lastly and because you hung in for the entire article, we are putting increased pressure on our human resource staff. In many organizations, management roles have become increasingly specialized with specific goals. You are being asked to demonstrate more and more that you have soft skills, and like wellness, the assumption is that to be considered a good manager you are looking after your people as well as managing, coaching and leading them.

Although the words sound great the reality is that being an excellent manager does not infer you are a great leader or vice versa. Each skill has different characteristics and demands. The newest and greatest fashion is that you should be able to coach your people too. Whilst a manager usually has some leadership and some coaching skills, they are not always highly developed, compensated for, or even particularly essential in many roles.

The problem becomes compounded when looking at wellness. If your company believes you are looking after, leading, and coaching your people…how do you justify bringing in the specialized resources needed to change behaviors and inspire change in your employees' habits. Personally I am an aspiring leader, a lousy manager but a great coach.

In closing

In an ideal world, your wellness goals would be accorded a higher priority with a correspondingly increased budget. The organization would recognize that it needs to build a comprehensive "human" preventative maintenance program. Senior executives would understand that the organization already has the responsibility for the costs incurred from using a run to failure approach to wellness. Employees would be able to say "My company offers excellent care if my health fails but also is completely invested in preventing that eventuality".

I enjoy chatting about health, absenteeism, preventative wellness and functional longevity. I have some different perspectives on how to create sustainable behavioral change and build healthy workforces.? Feel free to connect.