Featuring:
Jonathan Roberts, Senior Analyst
Show Notes:
Is employee wellness broken in today’s enterprise? Are executives’ rose-colored glasses simply too rosy to see the employee wellness environment that the typical employee sees? Senior Analyst Jonathan Roberts thinks so. In this episode of What It Means, he diagnoses the major ills in the employee wellness space and provides some helpful recommendations to make wellness a part of your organization’s culture.
The episode starts with Roberts laying out the major reasons why he thinks employee wellness is “broken.” For starters, executives and employers too often roll out wellness programs that they feel are successful but employees either don’t know about or can’t access. Another major challenge is employers viewing wellness as a series of projects or reactionary investments aimed at increasing employee productivity instead of viewing wellness as a key component of an organization’s company culture.
“The ‘why’ needs to be that we want our employees to be OK and have all of the resources needed to meet the tasks at hand,” says Roberts. And “resources” in this case must include good health, wellness, well-being, and energy, he points out.
While there’s not one size that fits all for employee wellness, Roberts provides a series of key factors that organizations should consider when trying to improve the effectiveness of employee wellness. These factors address issues such as employer motivations, employee trust, effective messaging, and more.
The episode closes with Roberts addressing a big question: Can the kind of employee wellness environment that Roberts describes scale within a large, multinational company? Roberts is emphatic in his response that, yes, it can scale, but only if it is viewed in the context of a space that is being created and not a laundry list of initiatives or budget line items.
