Business leaders feel passionately about creating better organisations and recognise that better jobs and better support for their people are key to this. But is too much budget being spent on surface-level approaches – in effect, “wellbeing washing” – without professionals applying new insights to get the root causes of under-performance?
Mental health costs UK employers £51 billion annually and only two-thirds (68%) of employees can balance work and home life. Burnout remains a top concern, with work-related stress accounting for over 50% of 2024’s sick leave cases. But many organisations still opt for ‘sticking plaster’ solutions that don’t deal with the causes of workplace dissatisfaction but merely treat the symptoms.
Workplace studies by Oxford University and McKinsey illustrate the difficulties. A company that gave employees access to meditation, relaxation and breathing practices helped flick off the ‘stress switch,’ but didn’t address the root causes of the stress that employees were reporting.
Similarly, a company’s movement programme for improving both physical and mental health, reported positive increases on individuals’ mental wellbeing but missed opportunities to address wider workforce wellbeing by adjusting movement within the workplace (e.g. by offering flexible working practices, adjusting physical work environments to allow greater scope for movement, etc.).
Organisations are commonly settling for offering their employees access to wellness platforms, gyms, nutritionists, and counsellors, without analysing the underlying factors impacting their employees’ ability to exercise and eat well.
What it means to be ‘well’ is personal to each employee, and wellbeing is a holistic concept, whereby mental and physical wellbeing affect all aspects of our lives. Perhaps inevitably, most interventions in a work context happen at the individual level and the wellbeing strategy and associated plan and budget don’t encompass broader organisational changes.
I advocate for a more collective and systemic approach to addressing wellbeing, particularly focused on addressing the root causes, rather than engaging in wellbeing washing. This requires companies to invest some time and effort in analysing what is affecting their people’s health and happiness at the level of, respectively, the job, team, and wider organisation.
The Design of Jobs
Many facets of a job can impact wellbeing, whether the breadth of tasks involved, required skills, and how they align with the incumbent’s skills and how they want to develop them; it can relate to the job holder’s workload and whether this might cause conflict in their value set.
Academic research in Germany found that doctors and social workers’ feelings of being rushed undermined their confidence that they were doing quality work in a meaningful way: they discerned an ethical conflict between their medical orientation and their organisation’s profit focus. Other employees experience different tensions: for example, an employee who places a high value on family time or the school run, may feel dissatisfaction if their job doesn’t allow for this.
Job design needs to allow people to fill their purpose, live their values, harness their strengths, and grow. People naturally need to feel valued and empowered by work, which is why job crafting techniques are invaluable in allowing people to adapt their jobs to make them fit them better. In many organisations, HR departments now organise this process or bring in specialists who can facilitate sessions with employees to identify the necessary tweaks.
Leadership and Team Effectiveness
Valuable work is going on at the team level where it’s possible to see the detrimental effect of people’s behaviours on team dynamics and people’s wellbeing, including relationships between co-workers, and particularly, line managers. Successive research shows that people leave line managers and not companies. With organisations frequently under-investing in building People Managers’ capabilities, many professionals ‘fall’ into their role without gaining proper support or training, or the opportunity to fully develop their leadership approach or skills to enable their team to thrive.
To lead a team effectively and build a culture that prioritises team wellbeing for enhanced performance, people managers have to have done ‘the work.’ They have to have developed awareness of themselves and of the impact of their behaviour and how to get the best from other people. Many People Managers and wellbeing advocates today reject the ‘micro-managing’ and directive approaches that were commonplace years ago. They recognise instead that systemic wellbeing thinking, involving workplace analysis and consulting – at the individual employee, team, or workforce level – will identify issues and tensions that undermine wellbeing and employee engagement, leading to poor company performance.
Through these analytical and consultative processes, People Managers and wellbeing advocates understand that, to get the best from their co-workers and teams, they need to empower them and give them accountability. I believe a ‘coaching management’ style is one of the most effective approaches to achieving the necessary behavioural change, and plug managers’ knowledge gaps, to help them become workforce enablers. In a recent case, a people manager stepping into her first role reflected to me that, she did not need to know everything, but she realised she was giving her team ‘the fish, not the fishing rod.’
Quality and Performance
This empowering-through-coaching management approach can then be expanded into the team ‘container’ ─ characterised by teams learning and growing through experimentation and facilitated reflection, co-creating solutions, behaviours and ways of working and strategies can be adapted as contexts change. By taking accountability and having the mutual confidence in one another that they will collaborate, deliver and targets will be met, heightening the chances that quality work can be done and performance enhanced – anywhere and whenever.
Effective teams clearly understand their role and responsibilities, how they will be measured; they talk about the type of behaviours that will set them up for success, how work should be done, to enable them to thrive, both individually and collectively.
These practices that create role clarity; belonging; trust; the ability to be authentic at work; strong relationships and fulfilment will help drive up productivity; engagement and job satisfaction, reducing absenteeism, presenteeism and attrition, enabling employees to be happier and healthier in work and their life more broadly.
Drop the Wellbeing Washing; Think Systemically
By refusing to settle for low-level “wellbeing washing” that only scratches the surface, People and wellbeing professionals can identify systemic issues undermining wellbeing and performance and use strategies such as coaching and promoting success behaviours, to embed a culture of wellbeing and support enhanced engagement and performance across their company.
Jessica is a coach (1:1 and team) and consultant supporting organisations to develop themselves and their people. She believes passionately that work should be happy and healthy, and she works to identify systemic issues that affect people’s wellbeing at work. She favours coaching to empower people to grow in self-awareness and co-create solutions that meet people’s needs and enable them to take ownership of their behaviour change.
Jessica undertakes wellbeing and culture assessments and supports organisations in developing new ways of working, and capability and job design that promote wellbeing and performance.
Through roles at Deloitte and KPMG’s People and Change consultancy practices, BP, and LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games), Jessica has supported a variety of organisations from different industries and sizes. She has a PhD in Leadership and Behaviour specialising in HR Operating models and Organisation design.