The great resignation has been attributed to many factors, but at the heart of all of them is wellbeing. People simply want a better quality of life, and they increasingly understand that isn’t coming from a bigger pay check, longer hours at work, and placing their fate in the hands of a few people operating above them in the pecking order of the organisation they work for. The great resignation is (maybe) in fact, The Great Liberation.
Whilst we’ve spent the past 10-years participating in a wellbeing arms race with our competitors, offering a series of ever-increasing and evermore varied and unusual wellbeing interventions and initiatives, we’ve neglected to take care of the stuff that really matters, and now it is starting to hurt…really hurt, right?!
Here’s what we should have been working on…
– People (not task) -focussed leadership
– Wellbeing-centric management
– A high-wellbeing culture
– More transparent, more authentic and better communication at all levels
– Inter and intra team cohesion
– One size fits one i.e. Flexibility
– Removing and reducing business factors that hinder wellbeing
What these thing have in common, is that they are all internal factors. These are the things our Wellbeing Consultant or Wellbeing Director should be focused on. Negotiating our next corporate APP subscription or hiring the next yoga instructor for Tuesdays at 5pm are secondary requirements, and frankly futile if we aren’t getting the above list in shape. Landing those interventions into a unsupportive culture is a false economy.
The answers to our workplace wellbeing challenges, namely low levels of engagement, retention, motivation, acquisition, performance, collaboration, productivity, innovation, creativity, are largely going to come from inside our organisation, not outside of it. This means a lot more work on our part, and a better understanding of when to use external products and services, and what to do to make sure they are as impactful as possible.
