How HR can implement well-being strategies

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Post-COVID turbulence means prioritizing employees’ well-being is more important than ever before. Here’s how it should be done

A COMBINATION of headwinds, including the COVID pandemic and rising cost of living, have piled new and heavier pressures on employees’ well-being. The cost implications for companies and national economies staggering back to their feet after harsh pandemic restrictions is significant. Yet this is also new territory for HR managers to understand and tackle. How do they do it? How can HR departments turn themselves into arbiters of well-being on top of all their other functions? As director of well-being, leading the human sustainability index (HSI) in North America, Selma Lalji Khamisa is at the forefront of this issue. One of her first tasks has been conveying what is meant by well-being, a term that has undergone some evolution in recent decades, with the World Health Organization determining that health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. It is, in other words, a complete picture of health.

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“When we talk about wellbeing, we're talking about the whole person, the whole human being. And that doesn't mean who you are at work and who you are at home should be separate”

Selma Lalji Khamisa, Aon

Lalji Khamisa explains, “Essentially, it’s this ability to feel good, to feel balanced, to feel satisfied; over time, the well-being definition has evolved to be something much more holistic.” She outlines a couple of the questions this prompts: “Do you feel good at work? Or do you generally feel good in life? And there are so many other factors that have become more nuanced around what well-being really means.”

This means that when HR departments consider the holistic health and well-being of employees, they must look at the whole picture of an individual’s life. They must develop expertise in human sustainability, which considers how to improve our quality of life at work and home overall, while avoiding that great bane of the modern professional, burnout. Well-being and encouraging human flourishing might all sound like secondary priorities for companies, but that would be to overlook the legal obligations they owe to their staff, which will be enforced by the courts. HR departments, then, play a crucial role in preventing personnel firestorms. Lalji Khamisa remarks, “What is that duty of care? What is that

responsibility? Organizations want to have well-being initiatives and strategies, and our 2022–23 global well-being survey shows that 80 to 87 percent of organizations have them. But what are we doing with them?”

Lalji Khamisa says, “Create an organization baseline of well-being. This baseline has the opportunity to be potentially more responsive, relevant, and actionable than traditional employee engagement mechanisms. A well-being baseline catalyzes data-led decisions that lead to, among many positive benefits, a more integrated well-being strategy and focused interventions.” \ She suggests starting with employee engagement surveys, in which many organizations have included well-being-oriented questions. Aon itself uses the human sustainability index as a data point.

Lalji Khamisa contends that every single person in an organization should have a well-being indicator, like a diagnostic, that marks how they are doing overall in their lives. This would be strictly private to the individual, but it would have the effect of empowering employees with that knowledge. “The person then has the ability to go to a manager and have a conversation and say, ‘I'm actually really low on my mental health and my physical health,’ and we know those are connected,” she says.

If distinctions between work and home are blurred to the point of indistinction, so too are those between the interests of the company and those of the employee. Companies should consider not only how their staff can adapt to working for them, but also how they can adapt to working with their staff. This may sound ambitious, but Lalji Khamisa stresses that it isn’t as complex as it seems. “Even if it's a simple training exercise that supports organizations around how to have a conversation about well-being, that would be an excellent starting point,” she says. And a starting point may be all that organizations need to achieve success in the area. Lalji Khamisa adds, “Where we really can improve is bringing up conversations about what works for us – what is your ideal working day? What isn't? Wouldn't it be amazing for you as a middle manager to ask that or even have it asked of you? And so how do you support managers with their day-to-day skills and maybe start to have some of these conversations? I think that's a great starting point.”

Employees stretching at work, well-being strategies

Holistic health and well-being

What can HR leaders do?

“A well-being baseline catalyzes data-led decisions that lead to, among many positive benefits, a more integrated well-being strategy and focused interventions”

Selma Lalji Khamisa, Aon

Top priorities for companies for the next five years

10%

20%

30%

40%

Source: 2022-2023 Aon's Global Wellbeing Survey

38%

Employee Wellbeing (i.e., employee's overall, physical, emotional, social, career, and financial health)

Attracting and retaining talent

Profits and financial margins (i.e., control costs and efficiencies)

Innovation of products and/or services

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)

37%

31%

30%

22%

Wellbeing journey

Source: 2022-2023 Aon's Global Wellbeing Survey

Priority

63% say wellbeing has become more important since 2020

Initiatives

87% have initiatives

Strategy

83% have a wellbeing strategy, an increase of 28% since 2020

Integration

41% have a fully integrated wellbeing strategy

Investment

43% increased wellbeing investment and only 3% decreased

This naturally blurs the division between the public and the private, between home and work – a division that dissolved entirely during the pandemic years when many people were constrained to work from home. “COVID brought that to the fore for us: What is this line between professionality and home life? We talk about this division, about work-life balance, but when we talk about well-being, we're talking about the whole person, the whole human being. And that doesn't mean that who you are at work and who you are at home should be separate,” she stresses.

Aon’s survey also showed that employee well-being is the top priority for companies for the next five years, beating out attracting and retaining talent, profit, innovation of product, and ESG for the top spot. While 87 percent of organizations have at least one well-being initiative, 83 percent have a full well-being strategy, which is up more than 25 percent since 2020. Importantly, 41 percent of organizations said they had a well-being strategy that was fully integrated into their overall business strategy. The key question here is how HR leaders can successfully implement these plans.

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