Article Summary
Post-Pandemic Wellbeing Shift: Employee wellbeing has gained unprecedented focus, influenced by factors like financial stress, NHS challenges, and evolving workplace expectations.
Balancing Responsibility: Employers must avoid both overly paternalistic practices and neglecting their role, fostering a culture where both organisational support and personal ownership thrive.
Actionable Strategies: Co-creating wellbeing strategies with employees, addressing structural barriers, and promoting awareness are essential for long-term impact.
As 2024 comes to an end, it seems health and wellbeing is on employers’ agendas like never before.
The principal driver of course: Covid-19. According to the CIPD’s latest Health and wellbeing at work report, the proportion of organisations with a standalone wellbeing strategy has risen steadily since the pandemic, from 50 per cent in 2021 to 53 percent in 2023.
Furthermore, 69 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that employee wellbeing is now on senior leaders’ agendas – compared with 61 per cent in 2020.
And with good reason. There are a number of drivers spelling out the vital part every employer must now play in this space, many linked directly to the legacy of Covid-19:
- The cost of living crisis springing from the economic impact of the pandemic means organisations now have had no choice but become acutely aware of employees’ personal finances. Financial wellbeing massively affects workers’ abilities to deliver; research shows financial stress can have an impact equivalent to losing 13 IQ points.
- Arguably another fall out of the pandemic: the challenges currently facing the NHS. Many employers are stepping in to fill the gap, expanding private healthcare offerings – and employees increasingly value, even expect, this so-called ‘serious perk.’
- Work has also now become more transactional for many – the result, potentially, of people realising work can be conducted perfectly satisfactorily from home and fitted around life tasks. And the result for some of disillusionment with how much was demanded during Covid for not enough eventual reward. So employee expectations about what ‘they get’ for taking a job, for making it into office, are inevitably higher.
- As more schools, workplaces and communities talk about mental illness more openly, there is a growing awareness around mental health. There is also much greater understanding now around the impact work can have, with some even terming this toxic workplace ‘PTSD.’
But is it really true to say employers have never taken such an interest in employee wellbeing? And is there a risk that in doing so, employers and employees may lose sight of the equally important role of individuals? In fact, answering this first question helps us answer the second: a quick look back at the history of paternalism at work sheds light on what this might mean in a modern workplace – where employers looking after staff is a good thing, and where this might risk going too far.
Where does paternalism come from?
Paternalism is defined as ‘people in authority making decisions for other people rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives.’ Many may be only vaguely aware that a strongly paternalistic approach to employees in the early 20th century was actually where the people function, as we would recognise it today, began. The history of HR and of wellbeing at work is, then, one and the same.
In fact the person cited as ‘the father of HR,’ and so also paternalism, kicked this movement off even earlier: Welshman and mill owner Robert Owen, born in 1771, was famous for his revolutionary practices, believing the correct environment could change a worker’s character. To the extent he provided not just favourable working, but also living, conditions – and free education. The more well-known UK example of course is George Cadbury, a Quaker who in 1893 built the Bournville village close to his factory in Birmingham.
But not all employer paternalism at the time was purely benevolent. Wages were often paid in the form of rent for housing or credit for company shops, for example. As such, as Alan Watkins and Nick Dalton write in their book The HR (R)Evolution, ‘Factory overseers or supervisors had tremendous influence over the workforce…’
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Paternalism today
Which may all sound more than a bit familiar. Fast forward to the early 21st century and onsite benefits in Silicon Valley firms sprang originally from the need to compensate for campuses often being situated in the middle of nowhere. Soon, however, where the likes of Apple and Google had gone, many inevitably followed. Free food, onsite gyms, sleep pods, lavish social events, even onsite health clinics, became de rigueur for companies with deep pockets and the desire to attract top talent.
Several big tech firms have since rowed back on some perks; Facebook for example, who in 2022 announced that their free laundry, dry cleaning and valet service would be ending (perish the thought) to cut costs. But the uneasiness around these kinds of comprehensive offerings remains. If employees don’t need to go home to eat, wash or even socialise, have they become effectively trapped – and perhaps seduced into overwork, into over engagement – by something of a gilded cage? As in the early days of HR, can paternalism sometimes have a more cynical, more controlling, motivation behind it? Can this really be good for people’s wellbeing?
Employer paternalism and the line between healthy and unhealthy engagement are, then, tricky, in practice, to navigate. As Watkins and Dalton note in their book, most organisations have – with the exception of several notable examples, largely in the developing world – by now moved past the paternalism phase of organisational and HR maturity. But is there, then, a danger of employers swinging too far the other way? Of (conveniently) divesting themselves of responsibility for employee wellbeing?
The right balance
At Investors in People (IIP), we believe the answer is that employers and employees both have a responsibility around workplace wellbeing. We have developed a Wellbeing Standard and We Invest in Wellbeing framework, including a maturity model for organisations, designed to highlight the importance, not of superficial wellbeing solutions or ‘perks,’ but of organisational cultures that promote good working relations, ongoing career support, supportive line management, fair workloads – all the things that matter most to people at work.
A culture of wellbeing sets the conditions for staff to thrive. Everyone is responsible for culture, but particularly leaders, managers and those in HR – who all have huge influence over how positive and motivated staff feel about work day to day, and how manageable their workloads are. Certainly we all need to take personal responsibility for keeping ourselves well at work. But we can’t do that until the right environment has been established for us – one that gives us ‘permission’ to take our own wellbeing seriously.
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Involving employees in your wellbeing strategy
The We Invest in Wellbeing framework recognises that health is a highly personal matter, with ‘wellbeing’ meaning different things to different people. Which means that what ‘good’ looks like will also vary widely between organisations. So ensuring your strategy genuinely serves all employees is about involving them in co-creating it. We advise employers to:
- Talk to employees, right from the planning stages of launching or refreshing a health and wellbeing strategy, to identify what is valuable in your organisation’s existing approaches and where improvements can be made.
- Keep everyone regularly informed of progress, so they feel invested in the strategy and their part in it.
- Promote what wellbeing support is available once launched – line managers will play a vital role in this. Countless surveys reveal often employees just aren’t aware of what’s available.
Ensure staff have enough time to take advantage of support. If the structural aspects of wellbeing such as job design and workloads haven’t been addressed – and people are stressed as a result – there is little chance of staff feeling empowered to practise ‘self care.’
Conclusion
Employee wellbeing is everyone’s ‘job.’ Employers ‘looking after’ staff doesn’t have to mean the intrusive (and potentially ultimately disempowering or even manipulative) forms of paternalism that thrived at the start of the 20th and 21st centuries. But it also shouldn’t be about relinquishing responsibility and consigning employee wellbeing to a category marked ‘strictly a personal matter.’
Certainly hybrid working has thrown the employee’s vital role into sharp relief. If staff are working from home, with any symptoms of ill health or distress much less visible, it stands to reason a certain level of personal ownership must be taken. Nevermind housing, free food and sleep pods, many employers won’t now even be ‘providing’ the desk their employee sits at for most of the working week.
And regardless of where someone works, ultimately the only person who can truly ensure personal wellbeing is the individual themselves. But they won’t be able to do this if the conditions created by their employer run counter to such efforts. Post-pandemic working also underlines, after all, how concerted employer efforts must be to really cut through. No one can practise ‘self care’ if their employer doesn’t care, or rather hasn’t taken care to create the right environment. Eighteenth century mill owner Robert Owen knew that.
Sources
Health and wellbeing at work, September 2023, CIPD
The HR(R)Evolution: Change the Workplace, 2019
https://complete-coherence.com/the-hr-revolution-change-the-workplace/
