Wellbeing and the stress response curve

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Organisations are increasingly seeing wellbeing as a ‘must have’ rather than a ‘nice to have’ part of corporate responsibility, but unfortunately surprisingly few employers have an established health and wellness strategy. With budgets stretched most organisations react to wellness related problems due to a lack of investment to provide a robust, effective wellness programme. Consequently there has already been a serious impact on employee health, as the organisation invariably doesn’t pick it up until performance is affected. Often the crisis point for the individual has been a considerable time earlier.

So what can be done to rectify this? Businesses clearly don’t want their employees' wellbeing suffering, not least from a cost perspective but also a retention and ethical standpoint. It isn’t enough to implement a health and wellbeing strategy and sit back…it needs to come in the form of culture change, from the top down.

Imagine, if you will, John goes to his manager or to HR and identifies that he is finding it exceptionally stressful to meet the deadlines imposed on his department. He can’t sleep, his family life is suffering and he knows his performance has dipped due to this. He is also very aware that a review is imminent and at least 5 people are to be made redundant. There’s risk in putting his hand up. Yet to lose John and his intellectual property would cost the business untold amounts. So John soldiers on, morale in his team dips and inevitably so does performance. In fact all the team begin to look for other positions. It doesn’t need to be that way-if the culture of the company changed, so that employees were not judged or viewed as weak due to the pressures being put on them, John could have received intervention way quicker.

Wellness and wellbeing of employees is vital for the productivity of any company and a culture shift within the British work place needs to occur to ensure that the strategies implemented can thrive and develop, along with the profit on the bottom line. Recognise the signs quicker, create an environment where the intervention can work and begin to reap the rewards.

Next month I will take a closer look at how the internal blueprint of John’s stress response can be altered-the most effective intervention!

Look forward to catching you then,
Richard

Copyright © 2016 Ethical Influence Ltd, All rights reserved.

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