With employee health and engagement at stake, the words HR uses have never been more important, says Grace Lewis
It’s a term bandied about by most HR professionals, but what does ‘well-being’ actually mean?
It’s not often that it reaches the top of the agenda at the company board meeting, and if it does make it, all too often an organisation will throw a few gym memberships our way and dismiss it as another fluffy HR policy done and dusted.
But, there are a countless number of studies and reports, which prove that the health and happiness of an organisation’s employees is the main driver of success; contributing to greater productivity and reduced healthcare costs for example.
So why is there still a stigma attached to the term?
At a recent event hosted by Working Transitions and Robertson Cooper, one delegate said that ‘well-being’ was not a word you’d hear in any business conversations, and in fact most senior leaders at his company wouldn’t recognise the term if used in an official document.
The delegate’s organisation – a regular in the 100 Best Companies to Work For List – refers only to the health, happiness and engagement of its employees.
Recent findings from the British Council for Offices (BCO) and Morgan Lovell could go someway to suggesting that the meaning and true value of the term ‘well-being’ is being lost in translation. While nearly three quarters of the office workers surveyed said the design of their workplace supports their physical well-being, 54 per cent complained that their corporate culture didn’t.
Consensus suggests that ‘well-being’ doesn’t capture the all-encompassing responsibility an employer has for his/her staff, from the physical, to the mental and emotional etc.
The choice of language has a huge impact on the way a situation is received, but that shouldn’t come as news to anyone in HR who has spent hours drafting an email and getting legal to check it over, before sending a company-wide announcement.
When my table at the Working Transitions event were asked to debate the impact on survivors during a period of change, ‘survivors’ was one word that immediately got people talking.
Every person experiences change differently, but do employees really need to be reminded that they’ve been through an ordeal?
We should be encouraging resilience, one of my fellow table guests said, with employees asking ‘what can I do to improve?’ Not, ‘what can I do to survive?’
A number of great learning points came out of the event, including the need to align well-being with resilience long before a period of change. And as ever, great communication before, during and after the change event is vital.
If communication really is the key, then the choice of words becomes even more important, and reviewing terms like ‘well-being’ and ‘survivor’ certainly seems like a good place to start.