Ronald Abvajee says employers focus on the wrong interventions in dealing with the wellbeing of their staff.
Award-winning wellness strategist and CEO of Healthy Living Consulting, and founder of MyHealth360, Ronald Abvajee says the wellness of employees is the secret weapon to success that most companies do not realise.
This week, during corporate wellness week, Ronald and his team will be promoting the My360 7-Pillar Wellness Model, aimed at organisations who would like to institute corporate wellbeing as a management tool and achievable team objective for everyone involved in the organisation – from board members to employees.
The McKinsey Health Institute says four out of five HR leaders see mental health and wellbeing as a top priority for their organisation, but it poses the question of whether organisations are investing in the correct solutions. Most organisations recognise the impact of the pandemic on employee health and wellbeing, and have turned to various wellness products and benefits – including things like productivity training, discounted yoga classes and meditation app subscriptions.
“As commendable as these efforts might be, we’ve found that employers are focusing on the wrong interventions, largely remediating the symptoms of the problem, as opposed to the cause of the problem,” says Ronald.
“A lack of insight or uncertainty in not knowing how to respond may lead employers to radically overestimate the impact of wellness programmes and benefits – while drastically underestimating the critical role of the workplace in supporting employee health.”
He says wellbeing is a secret weapon for companies that leads to success: “When looking at this secret weapon we tend to ignore it because we don’t recognise its phenomenal importance,” he cautions.
“When you’re looking at your business dashboard, how many dials are on there that you’re constantly monitoring daily? Here I’m referring to the important dials that show when something bad or negative is happening, which will prompt you and your team to immediately work to take action and fix it. However, there’s an additional “hidden” dashboard dial that you may not be looking at – and that’s wellbeing.:
Wellbeing, he says, contributes to high performance, and suggests that companies use the HLC 7-Cell Wellbeing Model – which is a wellbeing audit tool – as a framework to strategically reposition people and business drivers, held in a safety net of wellbeing.
“This creates a foundation of being relevant to your employees and business to obtain intentional wellbeing outcomes for employees and success for the business.
“This is a continual loop of diagnosis and then intervention which pinpoint the needs of employees and the business to continuously and consistently ensure the pinpoint of wellbeing are met and addressed immediately,” he says.
