As employers face a world of work in “full metamorphosis”, one expert says it’s high time for a corporate immune system check up.
In these unsettled times, a shot in the arm for business and workforce health is particularly critical given widespread warnings of employee burnout and workforce fears about what the future will look like in the age of human-AI teaming.
In fact, a weak corporate immune system should be viewed as a business risk, says Maura Jarvis, Mercer’s UK Workforce Transformation leader.
“The concept of the corporate immune system pulls in a number of components, both from the organisation’s immune system and how interplay happens between the person that you employ and their wellbeing, and how that impacts the strategy of the organisation and the ability of the organisation to actually deliver,” she explains.
Jarvis’ comments came as she discussed the findings of the firm’s Global Talent Trends 2024 report ‘Workforce 2.0 – unlocking human potential in a machine-augmented world’.
High stakes for HR
HR is very much at the forefront of this call to action. “If people risks are business risks, it’s time to raise the alarm,” warns Mercer’s report, citing further research from its parent company Marsh McLennan (MMC).
This research, first published in MMC’s Global Risks Report 2024, found that talent remains a critical factor driving enterprise risk. Nearly every country surveyed for the report said skills shortages or unemployment was a top 10 concern.
Workforce health is another area under scrutiny. The report said that ill-health among workers is still causing business continuity challenges, while non-communicable diseases (NCD), including heart disease and cancer, account for 74 percent of worldwide deaths. Stress-related illnesses are also increasing.
Company leaders will want to take note as asset managers told the report that they look at leadership and workforce practices when they’re assessing the value of a company. A large majority of asset managers, 89 percent, see workforce engagement as a key driver of company performance. And 84 percent say that a ‘churn and burn’ approach to shifts in skills demand is damaging to business value.
But the majority of executives fail to see the importance of addressing such risks, Mercer found. Just one in three recognise that their risk exposure increases if they don’t invest more in benefits to prevent chronic illnesses and reduce employee burnout.
With 82 percent of employees saying they feel at risk of burnout this year, taking action to boost your corporate immune system is imperative.
Multidimensional wellbeing
Wellbeing has been a topic of conversation for HR for a number of years. But Jarvis says that this year the topic discussion has been coming from all angles, from the business side, HR and employees. “Prior to this it was seen as a little bit of a nice to have, whereas I think now that business has cottoned on to this and sees it as a business risk that has elevated it in terms of the importance and the attention that it’s going to get.”
She says that employers can manage wellbeing risk by thinking about the whole package of benefits that they offer as well as how they can personalise and customise those benefits.
“Historically, organisations have taken a fairly paternalistic view in terms of what benefits they provide. What we’re seeing now is that there’s a lot more engagement and listening required to understand what people really value because we’re starting to see wellbeing as being more than just health. Wellbeing is also around financial wellbeing, it’s around mental wellbeing, it’s multidimensional.”
She says that to leverage wellbeing benefits for their corporate immune system, employers need to think about what is appropriate for different cohorts of people within their business.
Check with your workforce to identify preferences and then make decisions based on data rather than what people seem to want or what an employer thinks they want, she says. “What we are seeing in the benefits space is that you need to start giving employees choice as to what is uppermost in their mind.”
Time to reskill and upskill
Another critical trend for Jarvis centres on the concept of growth for employees and their organisation.
“Growth brings in confidence, brings job security, and we know that when people have a decent level of job security that also has a positive impact in terms of engagement in the workplace,” she says.
The report found that leaders of resilient organisations are 1.8 times more likely to balance empathy and economics in decision making. An example of this in action is how such organisations are preparing for the impact of new technologies.
“Executives of resilient organisations are 1.3 times more likely to say that jobs should be made redundant, not people amid the continued rise of AI and automation. Reskilling and deploying workers whose jobs are impacted by new technologies requires a growth mindset — yet less than half (46 percent) of executives rate their organisation’s culture as high on skills agility,” the report said.
Tackling trust issues will also determine the success of future workforces and how effectively the potential of human-AI teaming can be realised.
“We had very high levels of trust during the pandemic, and that has now started to slip,” says Jarvis.
“A lot of people are looking more and more towards the organisation for trust because they don’t trust a lot of the historical institutions that would have given them that, so the role of the organisation is becoming even more important.”
Employers can build trust by having a narrative that they can share with employees to explain, if they are able, their company’s growth trajectory, its plan and what the firm is doing, she says. “A feeling for your employability perspective [also helps], so people understand that the organisation they’re working for is going to make sure that they remain employable, so it’s going to reskill and upskill people.”
This is particularly crucial as employees are feeling very unsettled and very insecure in the face of AI development and automation and what it will mean for their job.
“I think that building trust is critical, because we actually foresee that there’s a much better business case to retrain and upskill your current workforce than to retrench people.”
Jarvis says that a client recently told her that they had worked out that to make jobs with ‘stunted skills’ redundant it would cost them £50,000. In contrast, the cost to retrain those people was a fraction of that.
“There’s a massive business case to be made for the reskilling and upskilling, which means that employees then don’t feel anxious and nervous, and they know that they’ve got a job, and they know they’ve got a future. That builds trust in an organisation, and the greater the trust, the better the performance. The better the performance, the better the growth.”
