25 March 2015
There is a direct relationship between wellbeing and healthcare costs, productivity and more, says a report by analyst Global Workplace Analytics.
The paper, What’s Good for People? Moving from Wellness to Well-Being, explores how better workplaces, processes and practices can improve workplace wellbeing, employee engagement and organisational performance.
The study starts from the premise that people are dealing with unprecedented stresses and pressures in the workplace that now need to be addressed in the context of a recovering economy, the limits of an approach that focuses on doing more with less and an increasingly scant pool of human resources and talents.
The four main conclusions of the report are:
Whereas most organisations invest in wellness, few address wellbeing. The indirect costs of poor health and wellbeing trump the direct costs by a wide margin.
There is a direct relationship between wellbeing and healthcare costs, productivity and more.
The top global drivers of wellbeing initiatives in the US are increasing productivity, improving engagement, reducing absenteeism and reducing cost.
Workplace strategies that address employees' physical, emotional and social wellbeing can increase employee engagement.
"Employers who fail to recognise that times have changed face losing their top talent to more agile employers who understand that without great people -people who are engaged in their work and eager to go the extra mile - there is no sustainable business model. Innovation ceases. The pipeline vanishes. Customers go elsewhere. And stock performance tumbles," write the authors.
The report is based on 4,000 case studies, research papers, and other documents on how workplace strategies such as agile work, flexible work, activity-based work, hotelling, open-plan, and remote work can affect productivity, attraction and retention, profits, absenteeism and presenteeism, employee workplace wellness and wellbeing, engagement, satisfaction, sustainability, and more.