Healthy Workforce = Healthy Profits

Wellness is much more than a means to health care cost control or a feel good HR initiative, according to a recent study by Right Management. Their findings suggest that when organizations address wellness using a strategic, whole systems approach, the results show improvement in employee engagement, productivity, and talent retention. According to their report, “Making wellness central to business strategy opens an important new avenue to increasing organizational effectiveness.”

According to the study, “Employees are eight times more likely to be engaged when wellness is a priority in the workplace. In organizations perceived as actively promoting health and well being, 55% of employees reported being engaged. In organizations not so perceived, only 7% of employees reported being engaged. Employee engagement is, of course, widely recognized as a driver of productivity.” In addition, the survey found that organizations where concern for employee health and wellbeing is high were four times more likely to keep talent over the next twelve months.

The key to achieving business gains is to approach wellness strategically and incorporate wellness into a broad organizational framework – strategic workforce wellness. Traditionally, wellness has been discussed in narrow terms of employee’s emotional and physical health. Strategic workforce wellness is defined as a state of well being that includes measures of engagement and other organizational factors such as retention as well as individual psychological and physical health.

Strategic workforce wellness addresses the issues at the level of people, structures, systems and processes. The results can be translated into measureable outcomes that identify root causes impacting workforce wellness and performance. The data can be used to design interventions such as training and coaching aimed at changing individual behaviors critical to organization performance. Finally, employee reviews and assessments can be used to measure how effectively employee behavior is aligned with organizational strategy and key objectives.

Strategic workforce wellness is a whole systems approach to health and wellbeing that results in measurable improvements in performance. In short, healthy workforce = healthy profits.