How is wellbeing and engagement approached in your organisation to date?
Slide summary of the article:
Many companies monitor staff turnover, accept high attrition rate, and tolerate a certain fluctuation in staff performance — turning a blind eye to sick-days, down-days, or excessive ‘event jollies’ to lighten the mood of hard work.
God knows we deserve it!
Typical initiatives to improve employee wellbeing and experience include:
- Interior design and refurbishment projects (or at least a pool table in the kitchen area).
- Wellbeing projects for cleaner air, better lighting, more greenery.
- Team building and collaboration projects.
- Flexible working conditions.
And how is success best measured?
That is: What is the best measure to validate an improvement in employee experience and the resulting business benefit?
In essence, the most sensible business measure of employee experience is engagement.
How engaged are employees in achieving agreed performance objectives while contributing to customer experience and committed to organizational development?
“The data are unambiguous: organizations with engaged workforces are more profitable, enjoy greater growth, and win the battle to keep the most talented personnel.” – The Employee Experience, How To Attract Talent, Retain Top Performers, and Drive Results
However: Recent research in the U.S. conducted by the Gallup Organization indicates that only 29% of the workforce is positively engaged (i.e. loyal, enthusiastic, and productive).
Why?
What is at the heart of achieving sustainable positive engagement?
While employee engagement has many elements, we believe that resilience is the most directly measurable and instantly improvable component of sustainable engagement.
That is to say, a resilient employee has the capacity and character to remain engaged, focused and energized for high-performance.
Resilience, therefore, becomes a key measure of employee experience. Both from the wellbeing perspective, and the performance perspective.
Yet truth be told: An employee’s personal levels of resilience has largely been left up to his or her own devices:
Whether it be curling up in bed to watch TV early on Friday night… and barely getting up until Saturday afternoon… with a repeat performance for much of Sunday…
Or a heavy weekend of drugs, sex and rock ’n ‘roll… so to speak.
Some employees hide chronic stress, while others search for greener pastures in a new job, or simply resign themselves to ‘getting by’.
Few, like the author of this paper, have opted for career breaks to travel the world in search of freedom, meaning and renewal.
Organisations can do better to support employee resilience — and thus wellbeing — and therefore engagement. Much better.