Coming up with wellbeing trends for 2012 during a period of such uncertainty seems like something of a poisoned chalice.
But a number of themes that started to emerge during 2011 are likely to gather momentum over the coming year and, therefore, are worthy of mention.
Not only were such topics talked about by clients, partners and think-tanks last year, but they were also raised by delegates and speakers at the Business Well-Being Network annual conference in December 2011, which sought to pull together some of the year’s most significant developments.
By now we know the context – money is tight and organisations across all sectors do not expect things to change in the foreseeable future. This situation has become the new reality rather than a temporary state of affairs and means that businesses are making cost management and efficiency a much bigger part of their long-term decision-making than when sufficient money was around to enable greater levels of risk-taking.
In the ‘old days’, health and well-being expenditure would usually be the first budget item to be hit in a downturn, but it is testimony to how far we’ve come that this no longer appears to be the case. Workplace wellbeing is now seen as part of a means of achieving higher levels of productivity, lower absenteeism and better customer satisfaction scores rather than just another luxury.
That said, organisations are not sitting complacently by, smug in the knowledge that they have got wellbeing right. Now that the concept has moved into the mainstream, it has become subject to the same levels of scrutiny as other lines of HR and business spend – and herein lies the first of the trends that I expect to see during 2012.
Outsourcing
Both organisations and suppliers alike are starting to broaden their concept of what wellbeing means and how they might be able to achieve it on a corporate-wide basis in order to maximise their investment. As such they are looking at ways in which to ‘draw a bigger circle’ around health spend.
The trend for businesses to see outsourced and third party services such as occupational health, employee assistance programmes and group income protection insurance not just as a reactive source of support (tertiary level interventions), but as a source of strategic organisational development activity is gathering momentum.
In all of these areas, packaged and, therefore, undifferentiated offerings are now available from a range suppliers. This, in turn, has led to attempts by vendors to broaden out their products in an attempt to stand out from the crowd.
Take outsourced occupational health services as an example. Over the year ahead, suppliers will increasingly provide standard elements of a given offering such as health screening, but also sell add-on options in areas such as rehabilitation (secondary level interventions) and ultimately even prevention (primary level interventions).
Strategically, this will make sense to buyers within organisations because dealing with problems at source should decrease the need for (and cost of) tertiary services. But ownership is important here because any changes of this sort will have to be integrated with the organisation’s overall health and well-being strategies – and in many, the strategic ownership of this area is still up for grabs.
A positive aspect of this shift, however, is that wellbeing budgets are likely to become more secure because they will be linked to areas such as health insurance. This scenario may represent a big opportunity to integrate health and wellbeing services more closely with services that enjoy more established funding.
‘Mainstreaming’ wellbeing
As wellbeing moved more into the ‘mainstream’ during 2011, it also became more closely aligned with existing HR processes rather than being buried away inside an occupational health function with limited links to other parts of the business.
As a result, over the last year or so, HR practitioners have started to consider how wellbeing activity could be plugged into existing processes without their necessarily having to embark on a major, standalone wellbeing project. This approach was dubbed ‘mainstreaming wellbeing’ as it was about evaluating how to include such activity in recruitment and induction processes, line manager training and even diversity programmes.
And there are a number of benefits of going down this route. In the short term, it helps to avoid cynicism from a workforce fatigued by seemingly constant change and enables the funding of wellbeing initiatives to come from several different budget pots. In the long term, however, it assists in creating a sustainable culture in which ‘wellbeing’ is seen as an integral part of the business.
Employee resilience
But the principle of mainstreaming is not limited to wellbeing. Another major trend for 2012 will be developing employee resilience and finding ways to hardwire it into the way we work. This is about moving beyond resilience training courses and e-learning programmes to make it part of the way organisations do business, from recruitment and induction processes onwards.
Employers who take resilience seriously can create an environment where sustainable performance becomes possible – whatever the challenge.
The growing interest in the concept over the last few years was initially intended to help organisations get through a bad spell, but people are now starting to realise that a climate of uncertainty and change is here to stay. This means that businesses will need a resilient, flexible workforce if they want to stay ahead.
Employee engagement
Of course, the continuing global economic crisis has started to put pressure on the psychological contract between employer and employee – as seemingly endless strikes in both the public and private sectors demonstrated last year. So we’re likely to see lively debate about what the idea of ‘employee engagement’ really means during 2012.
The seeds of this discussion were sown by David Macleod, Chair of the government’s Employee Engagement Taskforce, when he spoke at the Business Well-Being Network conference. He warned that simply measuring engagement should not be confused with inspiring it because, while survey results can appear positive, the feeling on the ground may not reflect the data.
In other words, employee engagement surveys may be fine as a starting point, but they are not a good investment unless they fully involve staff and lead to suitable action in order to address any issues raised.
Over the next two years, we could see control being increasingly devolved from HR departments to line managers in an effort to drive improvements at the local level. In practice, this will mean providing managers with easy-to-digest, relevant survey data and supporting them in turning it into tailored action plans for their teams.
Again, a key theme here is mainstreaming wellbeing into employees’ working lives rather than ‘doing it to’ them.
The Olympics
An important national opportunity to promote the health and wellbeing of the nation, meanwhile, will be London’s hosting of the Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer. While the focus will mainly be on physical health and fitness, there are also psychological benefits to achieving excellence and feeding those lessons into the workplace.
Although there will inevitably be a lot of talk about providing flexible working opportunities during the Games, I don’t expect practices to change markedly in the long-term – any more than the World Cup, which takes place every four years, has brought about lasting change. But there is concern over the potential business impact of high transport and accommodation prices and a lack of hotel rooms for more than six weeks during the summer.
While all or none of the above predictions may turn out to be accurate in the end, one thing is clear – there is still much work that needs to be done to win over the hearts and minds of senior business leaders in order to ensure that they are prepared to invest consistently and proactively in the wellbeing agenda.
Ben Moss is managing director of work and organisational psychology consultancy, Robertson Cooper. His Twitter address is
Normal
0
false
false
false
EN-GB
X-NONE
X-NONE
@psycho_boss.
