Wellbeing 2.0 - Not having fun

The wellbeing market is littered with interventions that don’t work due to lack of engagement by employees because they don’t fire their passion and they aren’t any fun. Gyms, diets, drugs, apps, training, meetings, support groups etc. can all be offered and inevitably fail. The gym industry is built on this. How many of us have taken out a year's contract in January to find ourselves not using it in March (silently raises his hand and looks around the room hoping to see others)?

Businesses are just as prone to this as the individual. The reason that so few businesses have an actual wellbeing strategy (or one that actually works) is that they are complex, long term and boring. Where is the excitement in a long running audit of the psychological risks that your business creates for its workforce (unless you are like me)? When I ask businesses about strategy and data, they seem to go back to being school children who nervously tell their teacher that they can’t hand in their essay as, “the dog ate my homework”.

If we want to make sure that people genuinely engage in wellbeing initiatives and then keep them going, we have to ensure that they are of interest to them as individuals to the point that they become a passion and that they are fun to do. The things you do regularly in life are the things that you really enjoy. Turning up weekly for that 5-a-side game or Zumba class. Spending time with your partner and your kids. Hanging out with friends. Counting your money (I’m talking to you Scrooge McDuck). Wellbeing needs to be tailored to a business or individual to ensure that it allows them to engage with it in a way that it is both interesting and sustainable.

We also need to create a sense of obligation, make it worthwhile and support on-going participation. Fun and passion are not the only parts of ensuring long term engagement with an activity. Sure, you love 5-a-side, but if you have a niggling ankle injury and an early flight tomorrow you might find yourself thinking of giving it a miss for a week. Yet you turn up, not only because of the passion, but because you don’t want to let the rest of the team down and you can’t miss being part of an epic game that might stave off relegation or win the cup.

There are a huge range of tools to help us with making things engaging, fun and worthwhile whilst helping to lock in our sense of obligation to follow them through to the end. Elements of an effective approach might include competition, embedding the actions in part of your routine, celebrating success and creating a sense of belonging and support for one another.

An example of a wellbeing initiative that really doesn’t work for employers is step challenges. You roll out your 12,500 step challenge to your workforce and maybe 50% sign up to take part. Not bad you think, but what if the 50% of the people who don’t sign up are the ones who would genuinely benefit from additional physical activity? As the challenge rolls on, the number of participants in it drops. Some lose their pedometers. Some simply give up. This leaves your hard core participants to limp on to the finish. At the end of the 3 months, what has actually changed for your group of employees as a whole? Probably very little. Few of the employees who take part will have a life changing moment as a result of the challenge and, even if some do, the small number will not make a difference to the physical wellbeing of the overall workforce. For those who did benefit from the challenge, when it ends they are unlikely to continue at the same level of commitment for the rest of their lives. This type of investment can rarely be justified on the basis of its actual wellbeing results for an employer, yet several of these type of initiatives are central to a number of employers’ wellbeing strategies in the UK. A waste of money. 

You can’t please all the people all of the time. However, you can offer a range of wellbeing options to your workforce, encourage them to engage in what is meaningful to them, recognise the value in them doing this for your business, support them to stick at it and maybe even push them to do more. We can’t dictate the solutions to employees. However, we can find out what people are genuinely interested in, which would improve their chances of engaging with something that might help them.  

For employers, we need to move beyond wellbeing as an ‘add-on’ strategy to an existing business plan. Instead we need to move towards wellbeing being an active part of your business plan, one that helps generate passion and fun in the workplace. When wellbeing is an optional extra, it can be easily dumped or side-lined the moment anything else crops up. Sometimes, the crisis that hits the business is something that a wellbeing strategy would actually have helped to mitigate. CSR is a clear part of the corporate agenda in the UK and wellbeing is a clear part of CSR. The decisions you make as a business, already directly impact on the wellbeing of your employees, so if you are genuinely interested in employee wellbeing shouldn’t all decisions be made with this in mind?

Whatever your view of him, Richard Branson is one of a number of business leaders to make the case for businesses to trust in their employees, look after their wellbeing and make work fun / engaging for them. He consistently makes the point that healthy, happy and engaged employees simply deliver better results than companies that do not have employees with these attributes. Several key scientific studies have broadly backed this message, including one showing companies with an effective employee wellbeing strategy outperform their peers in the S&P stock market (Goetzel, R. Z. et al. 2016).

So next time you are in the office, if you want to see how well your organisation is doing just look at the people around you and ask yourself if they are having any fun :-)