For a long time, good employers have been looking for ways to help recruit, retain and engage employees to help them perform at their best. The thinking behind this is simple: when people are supported, or even feel supported, they exert discretionary effort – and so the cycle of productivity and workplace engagement starts. While people have known for a long time that wellness is key to employee presence and performance, our awareness of this has spiked over the past few years and our attention has turned more fully to what is now coined ‘wellbeing’. It seems it is no longer simple enough to offer flu jabs and EAP services simply to tick the wellness boxes. Increasingly employers are being pressed to extend their boundaries, with the demand of employees driving this, for more scope in support for 'wellbeing'.
To highlight this increased emphasis on wellbeing at work, we partnered with the Resilience Institute to take a look into the state of wellbeing in New Zealand workplaces; what was being done well, what the barriers to success are, and what the future looks like. The result is our latest whitepaper: ‘What is Workplace Wellbeing? The New Zealand Perspective’
Here are a few of our key findings.
Taking the steps to elevate your wellbeing initiatives, while certainly requiring a concerted effort across the organisation, does have its benefits. The key drivers for employers to continue to focus on wellbeing initiatives were employee satisfaction, employee engagement, organisational culture, and productivity. Other benefits included lower employee turnover, lower absenteeism and a higher level of candidate being attracted to the company. With these in mind, it’s easy to see why organisations would see workplace wellbeing as an increasingly important part of their employment offering. However, alignment between employee demands and the employer’s offering is crucial to this working effectively, and this is something that our survey found to have a high degree of misalignment.
Part of this is natural; with a diverse workforce, employees will always want more than employers are apparently able to give, as employers seek to standardise and provide for the majority. Employers don’t want to become invasive in staff members' lives, but equally they see the benefits of creating access to information, services and support that reduce the barriers to employee engagement and performance at work.
With 83% of employees saying that wellbeing is important to them when looking for a new job, organisations will need to look for new ways to define and enhance their wellbeing offerings to attract talent. Looking across our research the initiatives employees want and the initiatives employers are progressively delivering are many and varied. Doing something is essential and getting it right could weigh favourably in workplace engagement and performance.
If you’re looking to learn more about the state of workplace wellbeing in New Zealand, get in touch to receive a copy of our latest whitepaper: ‘What is Workplace Wellbeing? The New Zealand Perspective’.