The coronavirus pandemic has upended our working lives and forced many companies to pause and reconsider the way they operate. What seemed as a distant future has now been accelerated.
The crisis has thus become both a challenge and an opportunity for businesses to reinvent themselves. Nevertheless, to make the most of this, companies need to invest more in areas such as employee wellbeing. And so, while before COVID-19 wellbeing was considered more as a pro-forma check-box exercise, it has now become indispensable to success.
New model to make your employees happy and engaged
For years, many companies have been doing wellbeing wrong. True, by now, most of them have learned to offer programmes oriented towards physical and mental wellbeing. Businesses would often invest in convenience-based services such as on-site launderettes and distractions such as gyms or ping pong tables. They do so to drive productivity while making sure workers spend as much time at work as possible.
The problem is, however, that these programmes are used in isolation from each other and companies’ policies often ignore two additional elements of employees’ wellbeing: the social element and purpose.
To make sure all these elements are incorporated, it is necessary to adopt a more holistic approach. To that end, the Adecco Group Foundation has developed the Workforce Vitality model. It unites both the top-down management and bottom-up feedback from employees and because it incorporates more than just the physical and mental wellbeing, the model helps workers to tap into and explore their purpose and to connect and engage with others.
Lack of engagement in the workplace: how to fix it
And it is the lack of employee engagement that is often disregarded by the old approach to wellbeing despite it representing a major problem for many companies. According to the research, low employee engagement negatively impacting companies’ performance and profitability.
Among those companies affected by this problem is the Adecco Group, the world’s leading HR company that focuses on helping businesses manage their talent and recruitment processes. Having realised its consultants suffered from low engagement levels, it decided to reinvent itself and the way it does business.
As part of its early careers programme, the Adecco Group UK & Ireland employs university students as consultants who are placed with other external clients, including a large proportion within FTSE 100 companies. The programme helps Adecco Group UK & Ireland’s clients access the best talent while offer young students the ability to gain work experience and learn new skills.
However, because of the unique set-up of how these consultants were managed – both by the Adecco Group UK & Ireland and the client itself – these young people often found themselves discouraged and disengaged. To address this issue and to find solutions to it, the Adecco Group UK & Ireland has recently pioneered a new model: the application of the Workforce Vitality Model.
Turning wellbeing and the company around: Case study of the Adecco Group UK & Ireland
The Model rests on several factors. First, it is a holistic model that incorporates four elements of wellbeing: mental, physical, and social elements as well as purpose. Second, it works with four enablers that are utilised across these elements, notably culture and brand, policy and practice, environment, and technology and tools.