“Running a business with unhealthy and unhappy employees is like trying to drive a car with a bad engine. It may eventually get you where you want to go, but the trip will be difficult and you’ll waste time and resources.” — Sheana Abrahams
Well-being is a blanket term for being comfortable, happy, healthy, and having an overall good quality of life. In the past, it has been considered a personal matter (and responsibility), and employee well-being isn’t always the business leader’s priority. However, in the current world we live in, well-being has increasingly become an organizational matter as well, and leaders shouldn’t disregard it.
There have been many studies over the years on how investing in your team’s well-being gives abundant personal and business returns.
One of them is creating a strong and healthy organizational culture. We know that culture plays a vital role in productivity, employee engagement, creativity, collaboration, and performance. It also has an overall impact on the public’s image and opinion of your brand.
Happy employees lead to excellent outcomes (products and/or services), which creates happy customers. And happy customers mean more revenue. In fact, research shows that for every dollar spent on employee well-being, there is a $3 to $6 ROI. Moreover, lower rates of absence (by 25%) and a decrease in compensation (by 41%) mean saving up to $5.81 per dollar invested in well-being programs.
If those numbers don’t convince you, just think about the costs of hiring, onboarding, and training new talents—having a healthy working environment that promotes well-being helps reduce turnover rates, saving you the cost of hiring the talents you lost.
Investing in well-being also has a direct impact on physical and mental health, which reduces employee health risks and keeps your team reasonably well-adjusted and thriving. That way, everyone has enough mental space and clarity to be more resilient, innovative, and collaborative.
Tired minds rarely produce groundbreaking solutions, and those can be missed opportunities that your business really needs right now.
Promoting well-being in the workplace also prevents burnout, which leads to less workplace accidents and mistakes.
Plus, it improves your overall brand image with the public. Especially in this digital age, where one post or comment on social media could easily go viral in 20 seconds. “Being human” is an important factor in public opinion, and while we aren’t here to please everyone, we also don’t need to go out of our way to disregard what people have to say about us. After all, the most important asset of any business is people—your stakeholders are your employees and customers/clients.
There is merit in grinding if it is what you need to do to achieve your current purpose, but we all need to prioritize ourselves and our health before everything else. After all, we can’t pour from an empty vessel. We need to fill ourselves up first in order to give 100% of ourselves to the things that matter. That includes you and your team.
Investing in your team’s well-being isn’t always about becoming a health expert or hiring one. Sometimes it just means being aware of different health issues (physical and mental) and creating that safe space to encourage your team to speak out if they need to. It can also be as simple as pointing them towards the right resources so they can seek whatever assistance they need to restore their well-being.
Are you promoting and investing in your team's well-being? What are some of the things you do to ensure that the company you are leading has happy and healthy people working for it?
Take care of your health, and thanks for reading A Brilliant Tribe.
