Wellbeing in the workplace – what does it mean to you?
Looking at employee health and wellbeing and how it can affect organisational performance.
Firstly, it is important to look at an academic definition of wellbeing in order to fully analyse and comment on its effect. Danna and Griffin (1999) had the following to say on the subject: ‘While definitions and measures of health and well-being vary, there tend to be two salient person-related concepts that are often combined with a more societal-level perspective. The first is that health and well-being can refer to the actual physical health of workers, as defined by physical symptomatology and epidemiological rates of physical illness and diseases. The second is that health and well-being can refer to the mental, psychological, or emotional aspects of workers as indicated by emotional states and epidemiological rates of mental illnesses and diseases’.
Wellbeing is defined in the dictionary as ‘the state of being healthy, happy or prosperous’ and here at The Synergy Group we believe that health and wellbeing is essential to employee performance and has a big link to organisational success – according to separate studies, figures have revealed that companies with committed, motivated employees will generate 29% more revenue.
There is growing evidence that health, work and wellbeing are closely and powerfully linked and need to be addressed together. A government report in 2006 entitled Is work good for your health and well-being? crucially found that work is also usually good for people’s health. People in work are generally healthier, while being in work can help people with a health condition to get better and returning to work from unemployment improves health. These positive effects apply to all age groups. While some work can present a risk to health – and these risks need to be carefully managed – far more people gain health benefits from work than are negatively affected by it.
With 1 million people reporting sick each week, businesses are suffering from a lack of awareness around health and wellbeing. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has estimated that 175 million working days were lost last year to sickness absence, at a cost to the economy of £13 billion. But the good news is that most common health problems can be accommodated at work and these account for two-thirds of longer-term sickness absence, incapacity for work and ill-health retirement. So this is a problem that can be tackled and more attention to wellbeing issues may be a key factor in boosting the economy and keeping businesses afloat.
In the near future we plan to publish a lot more around the subject of health and wellbeing through a number of channels such as blogs from a panel of experts in the field, newsletters to our candidates and clients about the benefits of promoting health and wellbeing in the workplace and we also intend to run surveys to gain information on how healthy Britain’s workplaces are, so watch this space for more developments.
