Why employee wellness matters – and how it’s good for business

If you’re leading an organization that employs human beings, their wellbeing must be a primary consideration of your company.

This is because the people who work for your company are people – and that’s really enough of a reason on its own.

And everyone wants to feel like they’re important to the people they’re around each day, beyond their functional role at work.

But from a business perspective, people are your company’s strongest asset. They help to make or break your organization’s success.

There is a direct link between improving employee wellness and achieving several critical benefits for your overall business. Therefore, a major priority of your human resources (HR) function is to:

• Learn how to enhance employee wellness
• Commit to employee wellbeing for the long term, as part of your workplace culture

Whether your HR team accomplishes this speaks to how well your company does HR.

In this blog, we’ll discuss:

• What wellness means
• How wellness (or lack thereof) impacts the people on your team
• Why your company should care about employee wellness
• Meaningful steps your company can take to promote wellbeing and solidify this within your culture

5 types of wellness to consider

There are five types of wellness that your workplace should address:

• Physical health
• Social health
• Professional health
• Emotional/mental health
• Financial health

An organization that is committed to wellness:

• Views people as people, rather than headcount.
• Makes health and wellness main pillars of the culture.
• Adopts a holistic approach to wellbeing, addressing each of the five aspects of wellness to offer support for the whole person.
• Understands that each aspect of wellness can impact others.
• Incorporates wellness into its people strategy and ties wellness to organizational goals.
• Has leadership that fully supports and is engaged in these initiatives.

So, when we talk about wellness, we are going far beyond the basic workplace commitment to safety on the job, mandated by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Instead, a commitment to wellness has far-reaching impacts on how you engage with your employees in a number of ways every day.

Impacts on people

When employees are thriving, they bring their best selves to work – that’s the type of employee any company hopes for. They’re:

• Energetic
• Engaged
• Focused
• Collaborative
• Creative and innovative in mindset

But when employees are in poor health in one or more of the five aspects of wellness, they’re

often:

• Distracted from their work and, as a result, less productive and more forgetful. In some cases, distraction at work can have severe safety consequences.
• Stressed and anxious, which can lead to diminished work performance and conflict with others.
• Negative, an attitude that can harm performance, damage relationships and prove contagious in the workplace.
• Prone to burnout.
• Absent frequently related to sickness, exhaustion, lack of engagement or a focus on other personal issues.
• Experiencing “presenteeism”, meaning they are not mentally present or productive even when they are physically at work.
• At higher risk for leaving the company.

Many employees spend more of their waking hours at work than with their own family, especially in workplaces where everyone works full time in the office.

And employment has an effect on nearly aspect of a person’s wellness, including:

• Basic financial benefits of a paycheck and benefits.
• Feelings of connectedness with others, belonging and supporting an important cause.
• Whether their role is more sedentary or active in nature.
• Availability of healthy food and opportunities to exercise, such as taking walks.
• Exposure to stress and potentially toxic environments.
• Opportunity to advance one’s career, gaining in title, status and salary.
• Ability to take time off to attend to one’s health or personal matters.

Therefore, it’s very important for employees that the workplace promote wellbeing.

The business case for employee wellness

Your business should prioritize employee wellness if leadership cares about:

• Reducing healthcare claims and containing benefits costs (particularly health insurance).
• Preventing absenteeism and boosting productivity.
• Decreasing employee turnover and, instead, retaining employees for longer periods of time.
• Maintaining employee focus and engagement.
• Demonstrating care for employees and strengthening their loyalty to the company.
• Preserving relationships between team members.
• Reinforcing employees’ connection with and feelings of belonging in the workplace.
• Enjoying a positive culture.

How to create a culture of wellness and a healthy organization

Interested in enhancing employee wellness at your company? Here are 10 tips for doing HR better.

1. Show appreciation

Alongside wellness, gratitude should be part of your company culture. This means demonstrating appreciation for employees and their contributions.

• Recognize employees and celebrate them for work well done.
• Personalize how you recognize employees. Ask each employee what types of recognition they prefer – some people enjoy public praise, others want a small gift card or lunch out with the boss, and some are happy with a simple “good job” email.

This reinforces to employees that:

• They matter.
• They’re doing a good job.
• Their contributions are noticed and valued.
• You care enough about them to recognize them in a way that is meaningful to them.

All of this boosts social and emotional health.

2. Make work meaningful and mission-oriented

For their social and emotional health, most people want to be part of something that matters and find meaning in their work. So, connect employees to the company’s mission – the purpose for your company’s existence and the why behind it.

• Talk to your workforce consistently about your mission and goals.
• Share stories of how your company is making customer’s (or society’s) lives better and improving the communities you serve.
• Explain to team members how they each make a difference.
• Align work responsibilities with employees’ interests and passions.

Employees who are committed to this mission are more engaged and likely to stay put. Even better yet, your company can shift toward employee fulfillment, meaning your people identify strongly with your mission and values, are intrinsically motivated to perform their best work and feel complete in their role.

3. Embrace flexibility

Most employees want to be part of a flexible workplace – meaning that, as long as employees’ work is getting done on time and meets performance standards, more freedom is given on where, when and how they work. (Of course, this depends on their role and requires some parameters to be put in place.)

Flexibility at work may include:

• Remote or hybrid work options.
• Flexible schedules.
• Increased paid time off (PTO) and alternative forms of paid leave.

Why is flexibility important to wellness?

• It lets employees work in an environment and according to a schedule that’s conducive to their own personal needs.
• It gives employees the clear approval and increased time to attend to their health, including doctor appointments that almost always occur during typical work hours.
• It can encourage employees to take short breaks to exercise, even if it’s just a short walk.
• It can help to alleviate stress and anxiety.
• It enables greater work-life balance.
• It offers more accommodation to employees in a caregiver role, whether it’s parenting or caring for a sick, disabled or elderly family member. This impacts the vast majority of employees.

4. Emphasize wellness in benefits offerings

Most standard benefits packages include things like health insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan and PTO.

Consider a wider range of benefits that go a step further in addressing employee wellness. As an added bonus, a more competitive benefits package can help with recruiting and retaining top talent.

Such benefits include a wellness program, through which you can offer employees:

• Access to an employee assistance program (EAP) to connect employees confidentially with tailored resources and professionals covering diverse topics, from obtaining counseling to finding childcare options.
• Educational resources for further wellness-related education and guidance, such as general tips on nutrition, exercise and stress management.
• Health advocacy services.
• Nutrition counseling.
• Weight-management programs.
• Self-service mental health resources, such as apps featuring guided meditation and relaxation techniques.
• Events that promote wellness, such as on-site flu shot clinics, health screenings or health fairs.
• Opportunities to participate in health and fitness challenges as a group and build camaraderie.
• Discounts or reimbursements on gym memberships and exercise programs.

Many of these services may be available through current insurance carriers as value-add programs.

5. Look to the future

Professional health is important to most employees, who want to know that they’re progressing toward their career goals, including opportunities to increase their salary, and that there is a place for them in the future at their company. Cultivating a continuous learning culture addresses this aspect of employee wellness.

• Establish a training and development program through which employees can advance their skills and knowledge.
• Have managers meet with employees for regular one-on-one conversations, which should encompass discussions about personal goals and how the organization can help to support them.
• Engage employees in career pathing.
• Communicate about policies and processes around promotions and leadership selection.

6. Mitigate stress

Stress can have severe negative health impacts on people, ranging from lack of sleep to increased blood pressure and poor mental health. Additionally, people who live with prolonged stress are less likely to exercise and eat well. As a result, they tend to gain weight, which can cascade into other health problems, such as diabetes and increased risk of heart attack or stroke.

Work with managers to rethink how they engage with their team members to avoid placing unbearable pressure on people.

• Emphasize emotional intelligence in leadership.
• Shift toward a more coach-like, supportive management style.
• Communicate frequently around schedules and workloads.
• Be more flexible.
• Encourage regular breaks.
• Abandon the idea that employees can operate at 100% capacity, giving every bit of effort they have, forever. This is not realistic or healthy.

7. Promote psychological safety in the workplace

It’s imperative to each employee’s mental health that they feel:

• Included and as though they belong.
• Competent to carry out their job responsibilities.
• Comfortable using their voice to ask questions, share ideas, disagree or offer concerns.
• Confident enough to be their authentic self at work.
• Secure enough to sometimes take certain risks in their work to accomplish lofty goals- even though taking risks means sometimes they will get it wrong.

Employees should be able to perform their work and speak up without intimidation from their manager or peers, or fear of retaliation or humiliation.

How managers can promote psychological safety in the workplace:

• Communicate clearly around scope of responsibilities and performance expectations.
• Encourage a speak-up, listen-up culture.
• Promote healthy debate.
• Practice inclusivity.
• Reframe mistakes not as failures, but as opportunities for growth and development.

8. Foster camaraderie

Enhance employees’ social health and feelings of belonging while strengthening the bonds between team members and improving team cohesion.

• Establish employee resource groups that connect like-minded employees who share interests in common.
• Engage in team building.
• Host social activities, like group lunches or happy hours.

9. Compensate fairly

It’s the most basic reason why employees come to work – to be able to support their families and lifestyle. Make sure you are paying employees in alignment with other businesses in your industry and market so that you are competitive in attracting and retaining talent.

And, especially during economic downturns and inflation, it’s important that you do what your company can to support employees and diminish negative financial impacts.

• Perform regular compensation benchmarking to ensure that your salaries are fair and based on objective data.
• Explore other financial incentives for employees, such as performance or retention bonuses.
• Increase company contributions to retirement plans.

10. Meet immediate financial needs

It’s an unfortunate reality that, no matter how good of a job you’re doing at fair compensation, there are unexpected events that happen when employees find themselves in financial hardship. These include:

• Medical emergencies or major illnesses
• Natural disasters
• Death of a loved one

Consider offering a company hardship fund to help in these circumstances. Employees can apply for assistance and undergo a vetting process, and avoid scenarios in which they have to deplete savings or go into debt.

Additionally, more businesses are offering student loan repayment programs – occasionally even as an alternative to 401(k) matching. Many employees and job candidates view this as a valuable, differentiating benefit as the cost of higher education continues to escalate.

Summing it all up

Employee wellness, a positive culture and business success go hand in hand. Your people are the drivers of your business performance and are therefore incredibly valuable to your organization – and they deserve to be treated as such. By embracing employee wellness, your company can reap several key benefits, including a more engaged and present workforce, improved team retention and cohesion, and even reduced healthcare costs. We’ve outlined several steps you can take to enhance employee wellness and demonstrate to employees and job candidates alike that yours is a leading workplace.

For more information on how to improve employee wellness, download The Insperity guide to offering irresistible employee benefits.