Wellbeing at the Organizational Versus Individual Level

Is supporting a work environment and culture that is conducive to promoting positive wellbeing and engagement more useful than just providing more mental wellbeing tools to employees?

Emotional intelligence isn't a soft skill that's nice to have; it's a necessary skill for modern leadership.

More organizations are recognizing the importance of wellbeing to their competitive advantage and workforce performance, but many organizations are missing a massive opportunity to improve their employee wellbeing by failing to proactively work on their psychosocial environment.

Too often, workplace wellbeing initiatives are aimed at the individual level; providing resources or education to employees that can help them self-manage their own mental health and wellbeing, or to support those in mental health distress. This often looks like providing EAPs and basic wellness resources. These tools are good for employees that need and use them, but we know utilization is low, and research shows that providing good health resources on their own doesn't improve organization-wide wellbeing or outcomes relating to employee stress and burnout when poor workplace cultures are not concurrently addressed (see this McKinsey report).

Next most common are basic attempts at the organizational level to address their culture, but often these only scratch the surface and most commonly aim at providing symptom identification or support for mental health distress instead of looking at the root causes and prevention. This might be mental health first aid or anti-stigma campaigns. Again, these may provide some value, but these initiatives have rarely proven to make a sustainable impact on workplace culture and shifting the needle on wellbeing at the organizational level.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity is taking a more proactive systemic approach at the organizational level. Wellbeing at the organizational level is most strongly influenced by your leadership. Many leaders have risen to their position due to operational skills, not people skills, and yet in managerial roles, it is the people skills and psychosocial environment they mold that has the biggest impact on employee engagement and collective workforce wellbeing. This is supported by an abundance of research. Gallup showed that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. They also showed that managers have as much impact on a person's mental wellbeing as their spouse and that having good relationships at work is one of the biggest predictors of engagement and performance.

While organizations understand the importance of leadership emotional intelligence, often training in this area is perceived as "soft skills" and often fail to achieve management behavior change. Sometimes that's due to an incongruence between manager training and broader organizational behaviors (managers are told to behave in one way, but the normal operational practices don't align), and sometimes it might just be that the training is inadequate to shift behavior.

The value of managers who effectively promote a positive psychosocial environment in terms of improving employee engagement, retention, wellbeing and performance can't be overstated. Some research suggests the costs of workplace incivility and poor mental wellbeing costs employers an average of $14,000 per employee per year. Investing in effective training for managers to enable them to nurture a better psychosocial environment should have a significant positive return.

So what does effective leadership training for psychosocial risk management and workplace wellbeing look like? It should explain to leadership the strong business case. They need to know that making an effort to learn and change is directly related to their ability to lead an innovative, cost effective, high-performance organization. It must include elements that provide personal insight and reflection. Often, managers aren't aware of the way their own behaviors impact the people around them. Simply sharing tips for how to be a good leader is often ineffective, because many people think they have or display those characteristics, when in reality, many of us have flaws that we actually have poor insight to. So effective training needs to help leaders understand how to recognize and manage their own emotional reactions and behaviors under stress before they are capable of mitigating stress and performance inhibitors in others.

When done well, shifting leadership behaviors and enabling them to build and nurture a more positive psychosocial work environment can truly unlock your workforce potential.

If you are interested in learning more about HBD’s neuroscience-based psychosocial leadership development programs, please reach out. Like all of our programs, we use our 30 years’ experience in behavior change methodology to build programs that are effective in shifting the needle on behaviors that make a difference to the health and performance of your people.