Explaining

Employee well-being

Below, we explain employee well-being as a concept and ways your organization can work to improve it.

Below, we explain employee well-being as a concept and ways your organization can work to improve it.

What is employee well-being?

Employee well-being refers to the state of feeling good, satisfied, and healthy in their working life. It encompasses people’s holistic well-being, including social, mental, financial, and physical health. Well-being strongly influences an employee’s ability to perform and is key to talent attraction and retention.

Below, we explain employee well-being as a concept and ways your organization can work to improve it.

What affects employee well-being?

Many factors influence an employee’s well-being, including the work environment, development opportunities, work-life balance, leadership style, organizational culture, job fulfillment, employment benefits, and career goals.

Employee well-being is categorized into areas that help to explain the concept: pshychological, social, professional, financial, and physical. All areas influence employee well-being, and an employer can significantly improve an employee’s well-being foundation.

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The 5 pillars of employee well-being

Psychological

Psychological refers to an individual’s mental and emotional state, resilience, and ability to handle different situations. It is impacted by self-respect, personal values, how people view their reality, and the power they allow others to have over their perceptions. A manager’s leadership style can strongly impact an employee’s psychological state.
Social

Strong and meaningful interpersonal relationships at work impact the employee’s overall well-being. A defining feature of humans is our social nature, which dates back to when our ancestors had a better chance of surviving wild animals in groups than alone. Today, social well-being is key to fostering a sense of belonging, enhancing collaboration, improving productivity and performance, and increasing retention and job satisfaction at work.
Professional

Many employees are driven by having a fulfilling job and career. This also refers to their ability to achieve the work-life balance and purpose at work that they seek. Digital technology can help employees with their professional development while not putting pressure on them to always be available.
Financial

The financial side of well-being means ensuring fair compensation so that the employee can focus fully on their job scope. While many employees today are driven more by the purpose of their job, they will also need a financial foundation to live and work.
Physical

Staying physically healthy refers to the nutrition the employee chooses to ingest, the amount of exercise they do, their genetical foundation, and how they manage their body.

Why is well-being important in the workplace?

Employee well-being is at the basis of an individual’s performance, which in turn impacts the organization’s overall success. Promoting a positive employee experience is becoming an increasingly common approach for organizations to improve both well-being and performance. Employee experience refers to how an employee perceives their reality at work and covers the employee’s perception of their entire employment journey across all touchpoints.

Not only is well-being the basis for performance, but employees explicitly look for it in their (future) employer. In a recent Gallup report, data shows all generations combined rate employee well-being as a top three workplace want, and Generation Z and Millenials rate it as their number 1 want.

Well-being impacts all areas of an organization, from the employer brand and the ability to hire and retain the right talent to resilience and performance. Gallup’s research shows that “employees who strongly agree that their employer cares about their overall wellbeing, compared with other employees, are:

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69%

less likely to actively search for a new job
3x

more likely to be engaged at work
71%

less likely to report experiencing a lot of burnout
5x

more likely to strongly advocate for their company as a place to work
36%

more likely to be thriving in their overall lives

Source: Gallup.com

Employees create today’s revenue and help shape the organization’s future. Their well-being impacts their productivity, innovation, creativity, and interactions with customers. Fostering well-being enables employees to perform at their best, driving stronger organizational impact.

Why measure employee well-being?

Measuring employee well-being lets organizations understand the state of their workforce, what works well, and what might be preventing well-being at work.

When you measure well-being, you focus your people on it and encourage an ongoing conversation about how to improve it. Employees who experience high levels of well-being at work are more likely to be engaged, resilient, creative, innovative, and productive.

The best way to measure employee well-being is to include focus questions in your modern employee survey. At CatalystOne Engage, many of our customers work with employee well-being (and performance) by measuring nine questions regularly. These are: clarity, efficiency, inclusion, enthusiasm, recognition, value, autonomy, development, and balance.

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Clarity

In our team, the work plan is clear
Efficiency

I have the tools and support I need to do my job well
Inclusion

I feel a sense of belonging at work
Enthusiasm

Right now, I am happy with my job
Recognition

I feel recognized and appreciated for the work I do well
Value

We are spending our time on the right things
Autonomy

I have enough independence to do my job effectively
Development

I have the responsibilities and challenges I need in order to grow
Balance

There is enough time to do the tasks that are expected of me

Combined with free text comments, these measurements give a rich understanding of the organization’s employee well-being status. The questions are few enough to answer on a regular basis yet provide enough information to provide rich analyses when combined with HR master data.

When you listen to every employee, you can spot issues such as toxicity in the work environment, lack of support, and low employee engagement. You will also learn what teams and segments have it right and can learn from their best practices.

How to ensure employee
well-being?

There are several important ways to ensure employee well-being, with the most effective approaches being:

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Transparency

Fostering an open ongoing conversation is the best way to support employees. When you ask for feedback and listen, understand, and act on challenges that must be overcome, your employees will continue to share their ups and downs and recommend improvements. Regular, confidential pulse surveys are common and effective tools to collect feedback, generate insights, and provide recommendations. The most effective is to share the employee survey results with everyone in the organization.
Manage the workload

While employees can work under periods of tougher workloads, it is important not to let that become a habit. To ensure employee well-being, their manager should help prioritize tasks when necessary and consider hiring when there are long periods of heavy workloads.
Social belonging culture

Developing a culture centered around social belonging helps ensure each team member feels part of the in-group. When employees have a sense of social belonging, they are more likely to have well-being and perform as the brain releases neurotransmitters such as dopamine and oxytocin, impacting motivation, trust, commitment, performance, and creativity.
Recognition

Ensure you focus on creating an environment where you recognize positive behaviors, efforts, and outcomes. The brain is wired to avoid danger and reacts more to negative than to positive stimuli. Therefore, you must make a deliberate effort to focus on the positives and encourage mistakes as part of the learning process to ensure employee well-being. When positive instead of negative stimuli occur, there are opportunities for creativity, engagement, and motivation.
Inclusive leadership

Teaching your leaders how to lead with inclusion is an important factor in ensuring employee well-being. Inclusive leadership is centered around creating an environment where everyone feels seen, listened to, and valued.
Well-being programs

Offering employee well-being programs such as flexible work, organized walks or runs, and wellness allowances is another effective approach to encouraging well-being.
Autonomy

Providing autonomy and involving employees to co-create and problem-solve helps ensure employee well-being.

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