If you’re here reading this article, you’re probably already familiar with culture and employer brand – in fact, you’re likely to be looking to improve in these areas (which is just brilliant!). Bear with us while we very briefly recap for anyone making their first steps.
What are employer branding and culture?
Simply put, your employer brand is the reputation your business has as an employer, and the actions you take to market that both internally and externally. It has nothing to do with your products or services and has everything to do with your people.
Company culture is how that brand manifests internally as a day-to-day experience for your employees. Your business values, standards and behaviours are key contributors to your culture. Again, it’s all about the people, not the products.
Why are these things important? Poor company culture drives employees to quit, and scares away potential job seekers; Hubspot research shows that 86% of workers wouldn’t apply for a company with a bad reputation. Repairing a bad reputation takes time and a much greater effort than taking care of it in the first place.
The bottom line is that employers are seeing their bottom-line hit in such a way that it can no longer be ignored. In Simon Sinek’s words, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first”.
The importance of wellness in business culture
When culture became popular in more recent times, there was a lot of emphasis on making workplaces fun, benefits packages attractive and trying to ensure workers enjoyed what they do for a living. And while these things are still going strong, they now form just a small part of the bigger picture.
Workplace wellness has been around for decades, but it’s only in the 21st century that we have really seen it become a phenomenon. A rather wealthy one at that; the worldwide health and wellness market was estimated at over 4.3 trillion U.S. dollars in 2020, a figure which is set to increase to almost seven trillion U.S. dollars by 2025 (Statista).
It’s safe to say we’ve moved on from game rooms and free coffee.
Although it’s important to recognise that one size doesn’t fit all, wellness generally falls into these five categories:
- Mental: feeling good – about yourself and the world around you – and being able to get on with life in the way you want (NHS).
- Emotional: the ability to successfully handle life’s stresses and adapt to change and difficult times (National Institutes of Health).
- Social: is a measure of your interpersonal relationships. Within the workplace, this relates to your sense of belonging, social inclusion, and social stability (NHS).
- Physical: the ability to maintain a healthy quality of life that allows you to get the most out of your daily activities without undue fatigue or physical stress (NHS).
- Financial: feeling secure and in control of your finances, both now and in the future (GOV.uk).
You can see how they interweave with the working environment, whether caused by work or at home. There are many ways that businesses support their employees across these categories, ranging from employee perk schemes, office facilities and flexible working. But a comprehensive approach across the categories has a higher chance of being effective, covering different personal traits and circumstances.
The current statistics
The pandemic dramatically increased the rate at which mental wellness was climbing the list of priorities for both employees and job seekers, by quite brutally plunging many of the population into mental ill health.
Many of us developed, and continue to recover from, (World Health Organisation) WHO-defined ‘pandemic fatigue’ – a joyless mix of anxiety, cynicism, and exhaustion. This, on top of the already steady increase in general burnout as the population worked more hours, paid more bills and came to terms with world catastrophes.
Employers can no longer dismiss their employees’ wellness as not their problem. £56billion a year is lost due to presenteeism, absenteeism and staff turnover (MHFA). That’s no shortchange for any organisation.
Stress is always at the top end of the list of reasons for staff absence, with over 40% of employees feeling “always” or “often” exhausted by the end of the working day. 78% say stress negatively impacts their work performance (UKG) and more people than ever are leaving their stressful jobs, even without a new one lined up (Medium).
Employees who are unable to balance their work/life are more likely to feel “poor” or “very poor” mental health. They are also three times more likely to be ‘coasting’ or ‘checked out’ at work (doing the bare minimum to get by), draining productivity and morale levels.
Managers often inadvertently become bad role models to their team, as they try to shield them from more challenging work, leading to heavier stress and working hours for themselves. That then drip feeds down to how they behave towards their team, with stressed managers not having time to adequately care for their workers’ wellness. In fact, a recent survey highlighted that over a third of managers had not spoken to their staff about their mental health over the past 12 months, with more that could not remember at all (ACAS).
Fascinatingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, there is a major discrepancy between how managers believe they’re supporting employees’ mental health and how employees feel that they are. 9 in 10 people-managers believed they created an environment where employees felt comfortable communicating frustrations, but only 64% of employees agreed. In fact, nearly half of employees are afraid of being honest about their mental wellness for fear of damaging their career chances (People Management).
79% of employees ranked managers equal to their partners in the impact on individual mental health, with a third saying that management fail to recognise the impact they have.
An enormous 81% of worldwide workers (management included) now prioritise mental health over high-paying opportunities – trends are shifting and businesses risk being expensively left behind by failing to acknowledge and act on mental wellness priorities.
(A lot of these stats come from an incredibly insightful report by The Workforce Institute, which we recommend adding to your reading list!)
How to embed mental wellness into your business culture
This is still new territory – there is no off the shelf package that fits all.
Begin informed
Businesses are beginning to see the huge benefits of conducting appropriate due diligence before starting on this transition and throughout.
In accurately understanding the current landscape and the perceptions both within your business and in the wider marketplace, you place yourself in the most informed position – research will provide you with the insight to get it right.
For example, MMC Research & Marketing has supported clients with:
- Establishing and updating values, which guide the way organisations do business and behave – vital in aligning new wellness practices into the current structure.
- Research into employee perceptions, providing valuable insight into what employees really think, having provided them with confidential methods of sharing that information (such as focus groups and surveys).
- Mental health statistics for clients to develop suitable guidelines as well as our own business leader mental health research which provided owners with useful support during and post-pandemic. We have also worked with the Department of Public Health in understanding the link between debt and suicide, and how they can prevent it.
- Due diligence to ensure our client was thoroughly informed of internal and external factors which might affect major business decisions.
- Stakeholder perceptions research to enable CEOs to get honest feedback from stakeholders on topics including culture.
We’re proud to provide clients with the flexibility to either act on our insights and recommendations internally or use our employer branding in-house expert to deliver even further for them. Either way, we ensure our clients are equipped with the up-to-date information they need to achieve their goals.
Setting expectations
For many leaders, there will be a degree of unlearning as they pivot to balancing profit and people. They first need to fully understand what they are committing to and what that might look like in the business. Without their buy-in, embedding wellness will be a constant battle and likely fail.
Depending on the length of time individuals or entire businesses have worked in an environment focused on profit-no-matter-what will impact on the speed of adoption of changes and is something to consider when managing both their and your own expectations.
Before acting on anything, it is important to understand and support business leaders’ knowledge and buy-in to the fact that this isn’t an overnight fix and is not something that can be achieved at face value. Building and cultivating any culture is a gradual process, embedded deep in the business – simply changing the wording on documents is not going to cut it.
Don’t go it alone
Making significant changes in business is a mammoth task for any individual.
Having a dedicated steering group to assess and implement changes into your business ensures a balanced, impartial approach and support engagement, ensuring it doesn’t simply feel like another task for staff to complete. Communication is always towards the top of the list when it comes to employees feeling engaged, so make sure you do communicate and that you also listen to theirs in return.
Have your team analyse what aspects of wellness you want to incorporate into your business, aligned with your values. While there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, the following are always towards the top of the list of impactors:
- Communication; sounds easy, doesn’t it (no pun intended), but so many businesses fail to communicate effectively. Being appropriately informed and included in the business vision and news, as well as the psychological safety of communicating without fear of punishment is vital in maintaining workplace wellness, as we’ve discussed throughout this article already.
- Leadership; get your management team to the same level of leadership training to ensure consistent behaviours to your workforce – having a behavioural framework will help keep them on track long-term and can be developed alongside your values.
- Policies and procedures; having suitable support systems in place for when your employees need it will help them to return to work in the healthiest and most suitable manner, as well as alleviate any worry ‘just in case’ something happens. Sickness is the most obvious reason in this area, but consider bereavement, paternity / maternity, mental health days and even career breaks – how can you as a business better support your employees when life impacts their wellness?
- Perks; whether you kit out the office in luxury, fund healthcare or provide allowances for tech, there are endless ideas to build a benefits package fit for your business values. There are even external businesses that can design and provide such services for you.
Again, this is where research is valuable to provide you with insight into your employee perceptions as well as real-life events that may be affecting them; for example, the cost-of-living crisis is currently having a major effect on normal peoples’ wellbeing, despite it not being inflicted by their employers; stress and anxiety cannot be turned off as they clock in.
Don’t let it become a fad
A brilliant way of undoing all your hard work and success to embed wellness is to treat it as a one-off.
Once the initial changes have been instigated, continue to have dedicated personnel whose focus is wellness in your business permanently.
Incorporate wellness into the whole circle of employees’ journeys with your business, from recruitment to departure, so that everyone goes through the same cultural experience and buys in from day one.
Hold your leadership team accountable in maintaining the desired behaviours and practices and provide ongoing training, support and communication to allow them to perform at their best.
Review regularly – agree a regular pattern of evaluation at the beginning and stick to it. Things can change quickly and if your workforce senses this is no longer a priority, or that your approach is no longer fit for purpose, your whole aim comes crashing down. There are digital solutions to regularly keep on top of how your workforce is feeling, and it is beneficial to regularly revisit the research we mentioned earlier to understand changing perceptions.
Overall, embedding wellness thoroughly into your organisation is no mean feat. But the benefits are well worth the effort.
For more information on how we can deliver business insights for your wellness ambitions, get in contact with our fabulous team.
