It’s one where leaders, managers and front line team members understand and play their role in maintaining a healthy culture. Because healthy people means healthy profit. After speaking with hundreds of well-being leaders over the past 5 years. One thing is really obvious. Like beer to Homer Simpson. Well-being has turned into the source of and solution to – all of their problems. It’s not (entirely) their fault.
The business case is simple but opaque. High staff churn, absenteeism and worse yet, presenteeism, is obviously expensive to anyone who can see (and feel) it but it’s difficult to measure. Senior leaders often fail to make the link between healthy people and healthy profit until something breaks. In them, or someone they care about. And if it’s really bad, they leave too. And all the well-being stuff we’ve done before doesn’t seem to have much impact
Much of what we see isn’t well-being as much as it is well-meaning. Speakers during mental health week. Cake on your birthday. Cycle to work vouchers. The list goes on. I love cake on my birthday as much as the next person but if the organisation isn’t meeting some of your most basic needs then it’s all a bit fur coat and no knickers. If managers aren’t equipped to lead compassionately, it’s going to hurt. If people on the front line are not engaging in the habits and behaviours which they’re going to need for the reality of the conditions they work in then they’ll never feel ready, and we know what impact feeling ready for something has. Everyone’s got a role in creating a mentally healthy culture and without a mentally healthy culture, you’ll never have a high performance culture and most everyone we speak to, says they definitely want one of those.
It requires leadership
Like most things that are worth doing, it takes a little bit of effort and a lot of leadership. In conversations with BelievePerform you can expect us to steer away from sticking plaster stuff. You can expect us to steer towards challenging conversations and evidence based, high impact expertise that shifts the needle at every level of the organisation. You can expect us to help you create the conditions for success by working with senior leaders to build and embed a culture that integrates wellbeing into the design of work. You can expect us to support your managers to embed change so that they feel confident in contributing to a healthy high performance culture that is led through a lens of compassion. And finally you can expect us to embed expertise through engaging wellbeing programmes that support all staff to be ready for managing the daily demands of work and life.
