Building Better Organizations by Claudy Jules

Author:Claudy Jules [Claudy Jules]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2022-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Make the Invisible Visible

By first determining where their company should focus investments in employee well-being, leaders will have the facts they need to take remedial action to shape the culture.

For example, when Mark Bertolini made an assessment of the situation at Aetna, what stood out in his organization was that, like many other companies, “healthcare costs are one of their biggest financial issues.” That convinced Bertolini that innovative wellness programs “ aren’t just ‘nice to have’—they are essential to the success of the organization.” He wanted to help employees improve their physical health, yes, but he also meant to improve the bottom line through reduced healthcare costs, improved productivity, and making better organizational decisions.21

To fully understand the current state of the organization—including barriers to well-being—means revealing the critical root causes and drivers that both impede and foster it. In other words, leaders must take stock of not just what individuals think and how they act but also why. An independent organizational analysis can identify where there are critical gaps that are—or may become—barriers to individual employees’ well-being and, ultimately, barriers to realizing the organization’s strategic priorities. Without such evidence and benchmarked data, companies will have a hard time understanding root causes and thus risk going down the wrong path to address problems. That is why hard data is a vital part of planning and implementing well-being initiatives effectively.

One hypergrowth tech company, for example, measures employee well-being scores across its workforce on a regular basis. When company leaders noticed those scores dropping, they quickly saw a correlation with the number of employees taking vacations, which had also dropped. This valuable information indicated that people were not getting enough sustained detachment from work—resulting in elevated depression, anxiety, and burnout risk among its workforce.

To proactively counter barriers such as low to nonexistent levels of detachment, leaders should invest in people analytics such as web scraping of employees’ calendars to determine how and where people spend their time. Similarly, biometrics obtained from wearables can give leaders at all levels new tools to collect workforce well-being data and perform rigorous analyses of organizational determinants that are tied to it. As organizations use new digital technologies to track the productivity of physical and remote workers and their well-being metrics, leaders can create a comprehensive and reliable way to understand root cause issues crossing all levels of the organization from top to bottom. Advances in digital enable us to go beyond sampling the perspectives of only a select few, most notably those of the top management team.

Although this approach can offer great benefits to both workers and organizations alike, leaders should take care to gather data in a responsible way. No one wants to have “Big Brother”–type surveil-lance in the workforce. Employees can voluntarily opt in to digital platforms that promote, track, manage, and measure their well-being, all through the integration of apps and programs (such as weight loss programs to manage obesity in the workplace) into the dailiness of work.22 To protect privacy, personal data can

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