A holistic approach to organisational health - the seven dimensions of wellness
Recently, we ran a series of roundtable discussions at the Public Sector Network's HR Innovation Showcase on "The Great Attrition": Looking within to elevate your current workforce. The takeaway from these valuable conversations was how employee experience (EX) is the key differentiator to reducing attrition rates and that the main driver of EX is creating a sense of purpose for employees and providing them with opportunities beyond just training programs for learning and growth.
The role of HR has changed.
Over the past few turbulent years, the role of the HR function has transformed into that of a strategic advisor with the task of future-proofing their organisation and driving a cultural change. Multiple research sources on employee sentiment show that the future workforce is characterised by a strong, unified purpose, feeling valued, and having support to balance their home and work life.
These characteristics go beyond the traditional archetypes of ‘work’ and 'role' and into the domain of workplace wellness. The Global Wellness Institute defines workplace wellness as "Any workplace health promotion activity or organizational policy designed to support healthy behavior among employees and to improve health outcomes."
Many of us seek wellness and equilibrium through outside work activities, including physical exercise, hobbies, and mindfulness practices, but as the lines between work and home life continue to blur and merge through remote and hybrid working arrangements, there's a need to ensure that wellness is addressed holistically throughout an organisation too.
Why workplace wellness matters
“When employees rated their business' commitment to wellness positively, 63% were likelier to be loyal .” Source: Employment Hero, Wellness at work 2022 Report.
The recent Employment Hero report provides some alarming statistics on employee wellness at work, with 53% of Australian workers feeling burnt out, 52% rating their work-life balance as poor or average, and 56% of workers feeling stressed about money.
Ultimately employee burnout is a management problem, not a personal issue for each worker: Josh Bersin, HR Predictions for 2023.
These feelings of financial stress, burnout, and an inadequate work-life balance translate directly into lower productivity. In fact, from 2021 to 2022, Employment Hero reports a significant decline in the percentage of employees rating their productivity as high in the past three months, from 72% in 2021 to just 57% in 2022.
As organisations focus on retaining staff and driving performance in continuing uncertain times, it’s clear that wellness matters.
Organisational wellness
“In 2023, it’s clear that the wellbeing issue is not only a problem of benefits or insurance programs; instead, it’s a design issue. When we design the company for productivity, employee wellbeing will flourish” Josh Bersin, HR Predictions for 2023.
One way of looking at the concept of “wellness” is by breaking it down into interrelated dimensions. This approach was called the six dimensions of wellness, created by Dr. Bill Hettler in 1976. The recent Employment Hero report breaks these down into seven dimensions which are physical, mental, financial, occupational, relational, spiritual, and recreational. Using these dimensions, let’s break down and analyse how business leaders can use these to address their own organisation’s health and approach to wellness.
The seven dimensions of wellness
Physical - organisational operating environment
Mental - organisational agility and resilience
Financial and performance health - organisational performance and strategic outlook
Occupational - employee experience, performance and satisfaction
Relational - workplace culture
Purpose - leadership style and organisational purpose
Recreational - learning and development opportunities
Physical - how, and how well, does your organisation operate?
You may know the what and the why for your business in terms of who your customers are and the value proposition your company offers them, but have you got a clear picture of the how?
An operating model is a visual representation of the combination of elements, including people, processes, and systems required to deliver your product or service to customers.
Your operating model breaks down these elements (people, processes, and systems) across your end-to-end value chain into independent blocks and reveals their dependencies and interactions. An operating model helps identify waste and make effective changes without causing unnecessary effects on interactions.
How does your organisation deliver your product or service to customers? Do you have a complete view of all the elements it takes to deliver this across your end-to-end value chain?
2. Mental - how does your organisation respond to change and unforeseen circumstances?
In recent years, organisations have faced uncertainty from COVID-19, staff shortages, climate change, supply chain disruptions, and rising geopolitical tensions. These circumstances have also strongly influenced employee perceptions about the importance they place on the work they do, their career, and their life.
Moving beyond crisis response into future readiness takes a new approach. In our article Finding the way forward – agility at scale in government, we detail how agile enterprise principles can transform an organisation to become more adaptive and responsive through networks of teams unified with a common purpose and configured around delivering outcomes. As McKinsey & Company explains, "Agile operating models configure teams based on facilitating outcomes instead of function and expertise. This orientation can boost productivity and engagement by limiting handoffs between functional silos and focusing a wider array of skills on a shared objective".
How is your organisation structured? Can you mobilise staff quickly? Is your structure preventing you from responding swiftly when unforeseen circumstances arise?
3. Financial and performance health - how is your organisation performing?
An organisation's financial and performance health directly affects the ability to make informed decisions and plan for the future. Is your business meeting revenue, profit, retention, or satisfaction objectives? Our BeHOLISTIC™ service deeply delves into your environment, exploring customer preferences, trends, and megatrends to design a strategic plan with metrics to help you achieve your business ambition.
Is your workforce aware of key trends and megatrends related to your business? Do they have a shared vision that they are working towards for the future?
Navigating the complexities of MoG for a newly formed State Government Division
Significant changes to organisations, such as Machinery of Government (MoG) or an acquisition or merger, can result in a need for role clarification and purpose and a realignment of teams towards common goals and objectives for the future.
A newly formed State Government Division tasked us to help them navigate this complexity resulting from a Machinery of Government change.
Process
We engaged all members of the Division throughout the project phases, including division members, external stakeholders, and the leadership team, to help define the road ahead. To get started, we worked together to ensure everyone was clear on the trends and megatrends related to their services.
Next, we asked the teams and external stakeholders to project themselves far into the future to imagine what a better life would look like for people in future generations. This approach helped to inform the teams on what they should do in the present to achieve this.
Then we helped the teams define their strategic priorities, clarifying how they would deliver their shared vision and illustrating the importance of collaboration inside and outside the Division.
Outcomes
Teams were brought together with a united purpose and shared a long-term vision for the future. Having the vision to work towards helped them re-think and adjust their plans toward achieving their vision and drop the things they were doing that didn't align with their future state.
Teams felt re-energised on the clear actions they needed to take to achieve their strategic priorities moving forward.
4. Occupational - your employee experience and their overall performance and satisfaction
Gallup defines employee experience as "The journey an employee takes with your organization. It includes every interaction that happens along the employee life cycle, plus the experiences that involve an employee's role, workspace, manager, and wellbeing". There are three critical stages of an employee lifecycle. These are employee engagement, performance, and development.
Employee engagement drives and strengthens the culture of a company. When you have your 'physical' dimension operating well, employees can connect what they are doing with why they are doing it. An operating model serves as this blueprint, bringing clarity to your organisation across key factors of purpose, work environment, practices, and leadership.
As explained further in our article, Finding the way forward – agility at scale within government, agile models configure teams based on outcomes instead of individual ‘roles’ or ‘tenure’. The recent LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2023 states that creating an engaged and resilient workforce is shaped through career development and internal mobility to help both organisations and people become agile. The report also shows that employees who, at the two-year mark, have made an internal move have a 75% more likelihood of staying with their company than 56% of employees that haven’t.
By focusing on a broader range of capabilities needed to achieve a shared objective, organisations can achieve strategic objectives on internal mobility ambitions that benefit both the organisation and the employee.
We've seen alarming statistics from Employment Hero's Wellness at work report regarding how burnout and poor work-life balance impact employee productivity and performance. The flexibility to work anywhere remains a top priority for employees, but it can also make designing effective wellness initiatives challenging and harder for employees to have important conversations regarding their mental health when they are remote. According to the Australian workers surveyed in the wellness at work report, only 50% worked for companies that were very supportive of employee's mental health, 39% of workers had companies that had tools or processes in place to measure wellness, and 36% of employees stated that their company had no budget for mental health support services.
What is the pulse of your workforce? Are they satisfied and performing well? Does the employee experience journey you provide stack up to the expectations and needs of your employees?
5. Relational - workplace culture
BambooHR says that a company’s culture is the personality of an organisation. It is a shared set of workplace beliefs, values, attitudes, standards, purposes and behaviours.
Like most wellness dimensions being related and influenced by each other, culture relates to your employee experience and organisational performance.
According to a US study conducted by Gallup, research shows that when employees strongly agree that they feel connected to their culture, they are 3.7x as likely to be engaged at work, 5.2x as likely to recommend their organisation as a great place to work, and 68% less likely to feel burned out by work always or very often.
The LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2023 states that 83% of organisations want to build a more people-centric culture. A people-centric culture recognises that its organisation's success relies on its people's success. And this truth then helps to form the employee experience throughout their employment lifecycle.
An area of focus for 2023 is flexible working arrangements and hybrid working models. A key to ensuring that employees feel connected to their company's culture is ensuring leaders learn how to lead and listen to all their team members effectively. According to research conducted by Gallup in the US, by focusing on culture in hybrid models, 23% of hybrid workers feel more connected to their company’s culture compared to 20% of employees overall.
Does your organisation have a strategy for hybrid work? What practices do you have to ensure you effectively manage your teams, regardless of where they are based?
6. Purpose – does your leadership style and workplace purpose resonate with employees?
The desires of today’s workforce, reiterated in our recent roundtable discussions, were having a sense of purpose in their organisation, feeling valued and supported, and being understood.
Our article: Finding the way forward – agility at scale within government, details how organisations can move towards agility. It starts with a common and agreed purpose that results from consultation with all staff to ensure everyone heads in the same direction when following the plan.
In 2023, we will need to learn to balance the new world of empathetic, flexible leadership with the need for ever increasing levels of productivity: 2023 HR Predictions, The Josh Bersin Company.
As leadership directly influences an organisation’s culture, key attributes of leaders can also directly affect an organisation's ability to innovate and retain staff. Tracy Brower, who works on commenting about work-life fulfilment and the future of work for Forbes, rates empathy as the most important leadership skill. According to research conducted by Catalyst on "The Power of Empathy in Times of Crisis and Beyond," when employees had empathetic leaders, they felt they were 61% more likely to be innovative, 76% more engaged, 50% more included, and 86% more able to navigate the demands of work and life.
Working empathetically in consultation with all employees on the path forward and supporting their needs contributes to a positive employee experience, greater productivity, and a stronger workforce culture.
How does the leadership style of your organisation influence your workforce culture? Does it impact culture positively or negatively?
7. Recreational – learning and development opportunities
22% of employees of all ages stated that they wanted their organisation's support to balance their work and personal life, according to LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report 2023. The percentage rose to 26% of employees aged between 35 and 49. With the direct correlation between poor work-life balance and employee productivity, it's in organisations' best interests to look into wellness and mental health initiatives. LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report for 2023 rated employee wellbeing as the 4th priority program area going forward.
What growth opportunities do you provide employees beyond training and professional development programs? How have you adapted your EX design to accommodate growth and success for your employees across their employment lifecycle journey?
How do you rate the wellness of your organisation?
Please take our five-minute survey, which asks key questions across each of the seven dimensions of wellness, to identify possible improvement areas that can help your organisation plan for the future.
At CorbettPrice, we offer services to help shape your strategic plan, design your business and operating models, and implement the design into results. Over our 20+ years of experience, we have helped solve more than 500 problems for our clients and average a 12x return on investment.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help your organisation today.
