Wellbeing is a science and measuring it and improving it offers a wealth of employer benefits from enhanced productivity and innovation to a 20 percent stock market bump, according to Sarah Cunningham, managing director at the World Wellbeing Movement.
“What I want to get away from, because I hear it far too often, is that wellbeing is a bit fluffy. It’s not.
“We’ve all had good days and we’ve all had bad days, and if you’re suffering, if you’re having a bad day, is that fluffy? It’s really not,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham was speaking on a panel about the importance of total wellbeing for employers at the Workhuman Live London 2024 event (4 June, 2024). Fellow speakers included Max Hunter, chief joy officer and co-founder at Motivators@Work, Sarah Whitman, senior VP and head of global e-commerce at Workhuman, and moderator Peter Newhouse, global reward counsellor at Neovation.
A happy CFO
Acknowledging the issue of the cost of wellbeing, Cunningham said she felt “a bit of empathy for chief financial officers (CFO)” because for every £1 they spend or invest they want at least £2 back.
However, she said, there is a lot of high end data that shows that if you improve employee wellbeing, not just invest in it, actually improve it, you will see improvements in the metrics that matter to CFOs such as productivity, talent attraction and retention, financial and stock market performance.
Citing a field study with BT call centres, by the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, she said the findings showed that “a happier employee is, big surprise, more productive”.
“We now have the academic evidence that a one point increase in happiness on a scale of one to 10 typically leads to a 12 percent increase in productivity.”
The same research team took data from the world’s largest employee wellbeing survey and used it to create an imaginary stock tracker for 100 companies with the highest wellbeing scores.
“That stock tracker out performed the traditional stock trackers in Dow Jones, the Nasdaq, in both the bull market and bear market.
“Last year, 2023 when the stock market was quite volatile, that portfolio of happy companies to work for outperformed by about 20 percent.”
Measure to improve
For Cunningham, the key science based metrics for employers to measure are employee job satisfaction, happiness at work, employee positive and negative stress at work, and a person’s sense of purpose at work. By measuring these areas, employers will get a baseline of how their employees are feeling, although it won’t tell you why, she said, adding that this is a starting point.
Fellow panellist Whitman described total wellbeing as “a comprehensive approach to the creation of a great experience for your employees, including their happiness and their health”.
She said that at Workhuman, it is about creating an environment where people feel like they belong, feel like they’re heard, that they matter and that their work is making a difference.
“Creating this type of an environment can actually lead to better business outcomes. We know that when people score higher from a total wellbeing perspective that they perform better. They’re happier in their jobs, they’re more engaged, they’re more likely to stay and you’re creating an environment that really is conducive to driving that business growth.”
Workhuman and Gallup have identified five areas, or pillars, of total wellbeing: physical, financial, career, social and community.
Whitman explained that physical wellbeing is about your health and ability to function day to day and bring energy to your job and life, while the financial pillar covers your economic stability and whether you have the funds to be able to live your life and support yourself and your family.
Career wellbeing is about whether you like what you do everyday and whether you feel like you have great opportunities for growth and continued development.
The social pillar covers the relationships a person has and whether they are meaningful connections that bring you satisfaction in your life.
The last pillar is community wellbeing, which includes all the communities a person has in their life. They could be inside or outside work, but wellbeing in this pillar depends on whether you have a sense of connection to those communities.
Employer obligation
Questioning what the role of the organisation should be across the five pillars, Hunter said: “Can we really expect the organisation to take care of us on all of that stuff? Physical for example, I want to make sure I’ve got good chairs so my back is okay. But whether or not I go for a jog twice a week, whether or not I eat healthy food, is that really the role of the organisation to take care of that?”
In response, Whitman said it was a question of whether wellbeing is an obligation or the right thing to do as a business, particularly as an organisation that houses people from all parts of society, and contributes to the greater good of society.
“It’s also about smart business decisions because the evidence we have indicates that when you invest into your people, your leadership and your programmes in ways that help to establish wellbeing across all of those dimensions, you do see better results from a business perspective. People are happier, they’re more engaged, they perform better, we see correlations to stronger innovation. From a business perspective, it’s the smartest way to run your business.”
