What is, after all, a healthy organisation?

Healthy organisations are characterised by an environment that enhance the employees’ health and safety, while also improving organisational effectiveness and promoting a culture and climate that increase satisfaction among employees. These organisations build healthy workplaces by empowering employees to reach objectives and work collaboratively, and additionally enable a healthy business environment for all stakeholders. Ultimately, a healthy organisation is an organisation that has extended their focus from the employee to the organisational system, and their health and wellbeing concerns go much beyond and deeper than the minimum legal requirements or standards in place.

Currently, workplaces are exposed to increasing and emerging new health risks and the current policies and practices in terms of occupational health and safety seem to be insufficient to tackle such a complex situation. It becomes more and more crucial for management to adopt a holistic and systemic approach to health management in organisations that can consider the concept of health and wellbeing in an evolutionary way.

Can we look at a healthy organisation in an evolutionary way? The starting point for most organisations is to merely consider the occupational health context, which means monitoring health signs, implementing safety measures and giving training and support to the employees when needed. In the next stage of evolution, health and wellbeing is perceived in a fitness way, when exercise, sleep, and nutrition are dearly valued and promoted. The third level has in consideration the employee family, career prospects and how they feel part of the organisation culture. In the fourth level, the organisation promotes a sustainable performance, and the concept of health and well-being is at the core of it. It presupposes competent leadership, clear goals, fair rewards, effective support, continuous training, and recognition. According to Josh Bersin’s, the wellbeing evolution in organisations combines a mix of employee’s vitality and business performance, that should clearly be sustained by all layers of health management.

A Healthy Organisation need to consider and incorporate six crucial aspects: (1) Physical Health, by giving the employees access to fitness programs (e.g., helping with nutrition, physical exercise and sleep) and benefits for their health (e.g., preventive care, healthcare support and personalised benefits responding to the individual needs of the employees); (2) Mental Wellbeing, consists of the support organisations provide to their employees in order to promote their mental health (e.g., employee assistance, work-family balance and communication); (3) Financial Fitness, focusing on transparency and equity, it’s also important giving employees the opportunity to make progress in their careers (e.g., opportunities for growth and rewards). (4) Social Health and Community organisations should enable empathy (e.g., for caregivers, young parents) and the opportunities that the employees have to make connections and establishing partnerships; (5) Safe Workplace, consists in guaranteeing that the environment it’s safe for the employee, not only about working conditions but also by designing policies for inclusion, diversity and equity and giving universal access to the same benefits for all employees; (6) Healthy Culture, it’s important to have in consideration that health aspects need to be transversal within the organisation and that leaders need to be focused on creating a human driven workplace, increasing engagement and commitment and creating healthy ways of working.

Moreover, the Health Organisation Maturity Model (Josh Bersin, 2021) can really help organisations to understand what’s their current level of organisational health. The four evolutionary levels are: (1) Employee Safety — which focus on employee safety and benefits. It could be understood as the satisfaction of the basic needs for human being in the work context, and wellbeing is seen as a benefit inside the organisation; (2) Employee Wellbeing, at this this level the employee is perceived as a person and not just another worker, existing an effort to expand the mental health programs and investing in tools or experiences to make a personalize effort to increase wellbeing and starting to think about careers, social aspects and financial elements that are relevant to the employees; (3) Healthy Work, this is one of the most important levels, here exists a focus on equity and accessibility when managers recognise the efforts from the employees, be it about their performance, collaboration and growth. At this point, the vision is holistic, and leaders and employees feel that their work has value, which in turn generates more productive levels, but the cultural aspect is still missing; (4) Healthy Organisation, this is the highest level of the maturity model. Here, there is a culture of health and wellbeing, characterised by a strategic and holistic vision, focused on the organisation, workers, and all stakeholders. The organisation doesn’t need to provide the employees measures to increase their health because it’s already an integral part of the organisational culture, processes, and outcomes.

This model shows that organisations have the capacity to mature and evolve, meaning that an organisation is not permanently stuck on one level, and it’s possible to mature to a point where the organisation is truly healthy. It’s important, however, to have in consideration that investing just in one factor of the six presented before isn’t enough, it’s important to make the investment in all areas, bearing in mind that some may be more relevant than others in a specific context. A lot of organisations have the feeling that investing on wellbeing is the same as investing on physical health and giving health care support, but this is merely a satisfaction of employee’s basic needs, and it’s not nearly enough to address the real challenge of creating a health organisation.

In conclusion, with the covid-19 pandemic health and wellbeing challenges in organisations were greatly accelerated and it become clear that is not enough for organisations to provide employees with tools and programs for health promotion or protection, if you don’t work to implement a real healthy culture in your organisation. The reason to build a healthy organisation, lies not only in better bottom-line but also greater sustainability by impacting not only the employees, but also the entire community around the organisation.

So, what are the first steps to create a more healthy organisation?

• Define the current level of maturity the organisation by assessing existing policies, procedures and activities and their specific impact on the organisation’s health.
• Plan what needs to be implemented to become a healthier organisation and set measures to assure that goals are being reached. It’s critical to have the capacity to establish priorities according to people and organisation needs and understand that this is a learning and development process and there is always room to make progress.
• Invest in all the dimensions of health. It’s crucial to have in consideration the physical health of employees or a safe workplace, but it is not enough. Organisations must invest in all dimensions and layers (i.e., physical health, mental wellbeing, financial fitness, social health and community service, safe workplace and a healthy culture) in order to really create a healthy organisation.
• Support teamwork and radical collaboration, guaranteeing that people do work together effectively (e.g., controlling for collaboration overload), are part of a team and are aligned in the same purpose. Also, develop partnerships that can allow clients, partners or providers to understand the organisational culture and become aligned with the culture, ways of working and goals of the organisation.
• Invest in leadership development, increasing the trust and clarity by providing clear and open communication in the organisation and sharing the responsibility. Also empowering employees and give them the support that they need on a daily basis.
• A healthy organisation is a sustainable one. For instances, to increase talent retention is critical to preserve and invest in each person in the organisation, giving them healthy working conditions but also opportunities for development and career management. The success of an organisation isn’t just its financial success, all pillars should be taken into account, and organisational health actually builds the social pillar of a sustainable organisation.

References

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Bersin, J. (2021, November 2). The healthy organization: Next big thing in employee wellbeing. JOSH BERSIN. https://joshbersin.com/2021/10/the-healthy-organisation-the-next-big-thing-in-employee-wellbeing/

Companies focusing on holistic organizational health outperform their peers, according to new bersin research. (2021, October 27). PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/companies-focusing-on-holistic-organisational-health-outperform-their-peers-according-to-new-bersin-research-301409484.html

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Murphy, F. (2021, November 3). Josh bersin’s new research on prioritising organizational health. HRD. https://www.hrdconnect.com/2021/11/03/josh-bersin-on-achieving-organisational-health-today/

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