Employees Are Healthy, But Unhappy
When Changing Trends and Existing Conditions Collide
Important Trends Impacting Most Workplaces:
People's values and expectations are changing fast and permanently.
Health and well-being matter more to people than ever.
Employee’s suddenly expect employers to support their well-being too.
Watch how changing trends combine with pre-existing conditions to complicate matters:
3 Existing Challenges Impacting Many Workplaces
Workload is an issue.
Workload presents a significant challenge for most leaders, often leading them to become reactive and prioritize tasks they are most familiar with. This can result in overlooking poorly understood concepts until they manifest into problematic issues.
Behind on Training.
Mid-level leaders often lack sufficient training, making it particularly challenging to adapt to change. Without fundamental knowledge, they are left to navigate changes haphazardly, increasing the likelihood of uncertainty in their approach.
Cultural Lip Service
Leaders prioritize and measure performance against strategic objectives. Without inclusion in the strategic plan, workplace culture and well-being will never receive the necessary time and attention they need to be executed properly.
Now, imagine leaders don’t understand the differences between, health, wellness, and well-being?
Health has always been considered important.
Health is objective and measurable. It is whether or not there are diseases, injuries, or maladaptive processes that hold us back from being our best, healthiest selves. We want to be healthy and free from injury and disease. We commonly understand health which makes it easier to plan for and support.
Wellness helped employees help themselves.
Wellness is about the personal things we do to manage our health. It requires us to invest our time, energy, and sometimes our money. Corporate wellness programs provide wellness tools, but employees must use them to be healthier. Wellness is misunderstood and most people don’t realize that wellness requires effort.
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Well-being values how people feel about their life.
Well-being is subjective; it is how we feel about our circumstances. A critical difference with well-being is that our environment and other people’s actions at work significantly impact how we think about our life, which impacts our health. It is how we perceive our life that impacts our sense of well-being.
Peoples values and expectations changed which combined with pre-existing challenges, so your good intentions might have made a bigger mess.
1 - Under Trained Managers Make Things Worse
When you are behind on training, leaders lack the proficiency and confidence to manage well which eats up time and makes it more difficult to have the necessary awareness to support performance or well-being . This further increases workload. Over time this changes the culture. Every strategy needs to budget more time and resources for leadership development.
2 - Overworked Employees Can Seem Ungrateful
Workload is rarely great and lack of training is making it worse. Employee health and satisfaction suffer from this pressure. When leadership rolls out the next wellness session or benefit, employees feel like the have to do more even work if they want to be healthier. Your good intention made them feel like you don’t understand.
3 - More Wellness Supports Made Well-Being Worse
You noticed employees were languishing and tried to provide more supports, but you underestimated existing conditions. Your good intentions combined with a simple misunderstanding of health and well-being and that made people feel worse about their situation because well-being is all about how we feel.