14th February 2024. Chris Cummings, Group CEO
Over the last 10 years since I started Wellbeing at Work, there has been significant change in the world of workplace wellbeing and the developments have been exciting to witness and to be part of. So what will happen in the next 10 years? I’ve been fortunate to work across many industries in my career and drawing upon this experience has led me to these conclusions.
Back in 2014 when I hosted our first Wellbeing at Work Summit in London, I was struck at how there were just a handful of organisations who were truly taking the health and wellbeing of their employees seriously. This was the age of the foosball table, fruit Fridays and yoga classes at lunchtime – all very admirable for their time – but there was something obvious missing for me as these solutions were all tactical initiatives with short-term gains and the more challenging, longer term strategies were missing.
Like many industries that I have worked in previously, corporate wellbeing was in it’s infancy and trying to find it’s direction and importance. Data was scarce, tactical initiatives were often fairly cheap and the impact was limited. However, more research and development followed, the data became much clearer and now we find ourselves a decade later in a position where we have so much evidence of the impact but we are not seeing the C-Suite of all organisations taking this seriously…why?
As a CEO myself, my key responsibilities are to ensure my team are engaged, they are performing well and are productive, I must manage risk and we must remain creative and innovative to stay relevant. All of these elements are critical to business success and the answer to all of these challenges are achieved through a focused strategy on the wellbeing of our people. But what does wellbeing at work mean?
To me, wellbeing at work is having a strong sense of purpose at work, it is defining job roles based on your people’s strengths, it is creating an open and authentic culture that celebrates differences and encourages diversity of thought, it is having leadership walking the walk and leading by example, it is creating a highly engaged team, it is allowing flexibility, providing growth opportunities and much much more. These are big challenges that are not easy to achieve but will have a huge impact on the bottom line of every business and that is why I take it very seriously.
So for me, the next stage in the evolution of wellbeing at work is clearly defining it properly to leaders by demonstrating the return on value so it is at the top of the agenda. Modern leaders have huge responsibilities, have very difficiult roles and are tasked to do more and more with less resources but if the wellbeing of your people is not on the agenda, these challenges will only be worse. We need to be a more mature industry overall – less of the tactical and more strategic, less of the so-called ‘experts’ with limited experience and more of the evidenced based approach, less of the cheap quick fixes and more on longer-term strategic thinking.
I speak with C-Suite leaders regularly and their main focus is always on the bottom line. If we want this to improve and if we want to create high-performing, productive teams that deliver business success, then we must focus on wellbeing in the workplace to achieve this. So, let’s all work together and provide the evidence, the case studies and strategic thinking that make wellbeing at work a no-brainer for the modern leaders who want to be at the helm of successful businesses.
