Me, We, Us. How to create the perfect employee wellbeing offer
Whether you work with Juice, one of our competitors, or you’re managing provision in house, there are loads of benefits to launching a holistic wellbeing offering to your employees. To name just a few:
- Your organisation has a more attractive recruitment proposition
- You’ll have better staff retention
- Employees will feel more engaged with the organisation and their colleagues
- You’ll have the makings a positive workplace culture
- Employees will likely be more productive, and offer a better service to your customers
- You’ll decrease sickness absence and presenteeism.
So, despite all these benefits, you have to ask the question; why are we still finding it tough to introduce successful wellbeing initiatives?
There are loads of answers to this question. However, often it comes down to selecting who your stakeholders are and giving them a voice. I’m not talking about the Board, I’m talking about everyone.
When you’re looking to implement and drive an employee wellbeing initiative, or any initiative for that matter, you need to look at what the needs are for three distinct levels, regardless of your organisation’s structure or size.
Introducing Me, We, and Us.
- Me — What does wellbeing mean to me as an individual? What can I do to improve my own wellbeing?
- We — What does wellbeing mean to us as a team or department? What can we do as a team or department to improve wellbeing?
- Us — What does wellbeing mean to us as an organisation? What does the organisation need to do to facilitate optimal wellbeing?
This model, through its simplicity and language, can easily provide organisations with multiple levels of intervention to really get the best out of your offer, and ensure that it meets the needs of everyone. This is critical because wellbeing initiatives often target employees with little consideration of their needs, or do not align with the organisation’s objectives.
To summarise a story told by Dame Carol Black, who I’ve had the privilege of meeting and working with on a number of occasions, there was once a young, innovative new in post Managing Director at a large shipping facility in South East England. He bought into the wellbeing agenda personally and wanted to create the healthiest workforce in the industry, and went about running various different types of wellbeing provision on site that he thought would be beneficial.
Whilst this was offered with the best intentions, nobody turned up.
When he asked employees and teams why nobody went, feedback was that levels of employee literacy and numeracy were poor, and employees would rather have the opportunity to learn and grow through education.
The director took this on board, offered literacy and numeracy classes (even resulting in qualifications), and then reintroduced more traditional wellbeing provision shortly after. This change of approach saw dramatically improved engagement in services and they have now met their goal of being the healthiest organisation in the shipping industry.
The problem in this example was that he only considered the organisation’s objectives and didn’t seek employee and team voice. By listening to the Me and We and actioning the feedback, whilst simultaneously aligning this with the organisation’s objectives, the Us, he saw significant increases in engagement and all parties benefited.
Workplace wellbeing initiatives engaging with these three key stakeholders are helping employees utilise their strengths, share their reflections/observations, and ensures that organisations get a sufficient return on their investment because it’s aligned to everyone’s objectives and needs.
So, what needs are you answering for Me, We, and Us in your wellbeing offering?
Everyday Juice Limited
We believe that everyone has the right to be healthy and happy at work, connected to a community of colleagues who are passionate about making a positive impact on themselves and the workplace.
If you want to create a remarkable place to work for your employees, why not get in touch.
