Cary Cooper applauds the way health at work initiatives drive business success
Every profession is prone to a bit of self-examination and, as long as it doesn’t become a distraction from the day job, it can be useful. So it makes sense to me to ask if HR is visible, influential, and most of all doing a good job.
I think that HR has less influence than it did five or 10 years ago, but there is a group of HR directors who are building influence with the well-being agenda and positioning HR as a function that defines business success.
At the Good Day at Work conference this month, HR practitioners from TSB, British Airways, the NHS, Morrisons, spoke about ambitious, organisation-wide employee well-being strategies – all of them with buy-in from their boards. And with one in five companies planning to increase health and well-being spend this year, it’s vital to learn from these employers making an impact.
One thing that unites them is their ability to make well-being personal. When it comes to psychological and emotional well-being, support for individuals shouldn’t be nameless and faceless. Clarke Carlisle, Mind ambassador and former chairman of the Professional Football Association, spoke recently about the massive positive impact that he created simply by looking his ex-teammates in the eye every morning, shaking their hand and asking them how they were. The same is true at a business level. HR must make an emotional, personal connection with the organisation when it comes to well-being, and that means identifying ambitious goals that go above return on investment.
Ten years ago, the well-being agenda and HR gained a lot of traction by making the business case – driving low absenteeism, high productivity and engagement. In 2014 the reality is that most departments are competing for budget and attention on this basis. So, what is HR doing to set well-being and their people mission apart?
Just as we have to personalise well-being for the individual, to gain the most traction and results, we have to personalise it for the business too. To use the examples from the conference, TSB are aligning employee well-being at the heart of their mission to be ‘a different sort of bank’, increase competition in high street banking and use a John Lewis type partnership model to achieve it. British Airways too are keying well-being into their entire brand and corporate history. It’s about more than driving engagement, it’s about being part of much loved institution.
Examples like these set the bar high for HR, to sit at the top table and define the direction of entire organisations. The challenge now is to move on from the business case to think strategically about health and well-being, view it as an essential part of employer value propositions, brands and how businesses engage with communities.
It’s a tough challenge but it’s one worth taking on. When well-being works, it goes right down to personal experience, to the individual moments that matter and or many in HR, that’s why they entered the profession. There is more national support for that goal than ever, with the Office for National Statistics and the Prime Minister among the champions for well-being. HR needs to follow their lead and lift its collective head to think about how it fits at their organisation’s top strategic level. Not only will it provide rich rewards for businesses and their employees, but it will put HR back on the influence map too.