Employee Wellness: A Workplace Key Differentiator In 2022 And Beyond

Wellbeing is truly comprehensive in that it encompasses employee health, physical, mental, social spiritual and perhaps more. Whereas wellness concentrates typically on those aspects related to and leading to one’s physical health, predominantly. Wellbeing describes a lifestyle far beyond illness and stands for the wider and holistic dimensions of human life and existence. However, wellness is foundational and the most basic element in overall wellbeing as it denotes and promotes the thriving part of life. Wellness opens the doors to well-being; it is a means to an end. In recent times, employers have realized the importance of employee wellness impact on the organization’s performance, something that was seldom talked about.

Employee wellness has gathered a lot more momentum during the pandemic days and continues to build up. Employers have recognized not only that they play an influential role but also own certain responsibility in helping employees inculcate healthy behaviors that can promote good physical and mental health. As such unlike many other trendy topics in the people domain, wellness moved quite fast from being a topic of debate to an agenda for action. Today a lot of workplaces and workplace practices do consider employee wellness as central to structuring shifts, schedules and other routines. This is seen from the openness on the side of the employers to provide more flexibilities, increase in insurance coverages, budgetary provisions for wellness focus and the like. In the recent times, organizations have arranged for vaccination for self and family, liberalized the use of leaves in general, formalized ‘no meeting days’, restricted hours for meetings and calls beyond office hours etc. Quite a few organizations have gone far beyond all of these to comprehensive health and wellness solutions that are customized to suit the employee’s unique and timely needs. These days of talent revolution, one of the things that people look for beyond salary and perks is a wide-ranging and thoughtful wellness program in the workplace.

At CDK, a certified Great Place to Work, we had brought in focus on employee wellbeing as a critical component of our culture long ago and ushered in a series of initiatives around wellness, some of those high impact initiatives are:

· Doctor Talk/ Health Webinar Series meant to create opportunities for employees and families recovering from COVID-19 to interact with experts and learn to be well. Sessions on mental health, happiness and webinars on how to face challenging times especially for women, awareness sessions on child safety and

care during the pandemic etc. are a few other things that we supported our employees with.

· Encouraged and helped practicing basic yoga asana and breathing exercises, arranged for online meditation, Zumba session etc. to attain calmness and equanimity.

· Step challenge was an all-time hit among employees organized in several formats targeting different audience to promote fitness for self, family and friends.

· Volley of virtual engagement programs such as music jam session, a relatively informal musical event, photography and cooking challenges, riddle camps, humorous speech contests etc. contributed towards de-stressor and wellness.

· Some of the other ideas that we are working on are wellness chat box- chatting opportunity for employees to seek medical advice, Healthy Day/ Week Challenge – encouraging to follow healthy diet on a specific day/ week every month, Walking Meetings- leaders to set up some of the stand-up calls over phone and encourage employees to walk and talk etc.

Our wellness programs aim to reduce all sorts of stress and create positive working environments where individuals can perform their job well and thrive. Of course, this is a key enabler for deeper employee engagement and sustained performance. These programs also create a sense of personal freedom and drive self-determination, instill the desire to continually improve, infuse a sense of meaning and purpose in work and life itself, that is getting defined and redefined these days.

Some of these programs while may seem commonplace, they are made special for our employees at CDK by bringing in personalization, inclusive of family and in some ways creating unique opportunities to unleash talent beyond work as the virtual engagement programs are run by our own employees. Our employees across levels have acknowledged that these programs have created enough excitement, enhanced their experience at CDK as a great place to work, resulting in improved engagement index.

It is proved beyond doubt that a lack of solid thinking and smart initiatives around employee wellness will not only negatively impact employee perception about the workplace, productivity and performance in the workplace, but also can be a deterrent to attract talent in the coming days.

(The given authored article is attributed to Joy George is a Head – Human Resources, CDK Global India and has been exclusively created for BW People website)