What are the strengths and weaknesses of your employee wellness programme?
One of the biggest oversights found in many organisations is that these generally don't factor their human capital risks into the running of their businesses nor integrate these risks into the overall risks of the companies. Even worse, the talent found within the organisation's human capital is rarely understood and the elements associated with the company's human capital and talent is often seen as an 'intangible asset'. The elements aren't factored as a value item on the balance sheet.
HR professionals are no longer seen as 'soft' appointments
In an ever-increasing competitive economic landscape, the role of management – who're seen as responsible for the organisation's human capital - has expanded significantly. The human capital managers of today are required to be - in addition to their normal expected qualifications and duties - knowledgeable about a wide range of business and financial matters.
The HR managers are expected to be so much more than their predecessors:
- Their personal risk and liability factors have increased significantly in recent times.
- They're quite frankly a rare and new breed of business leader who're required to be strategic and at the same time understand the critical importance of managing the organisation's human capital and talent.
Accordingly, with greater business integration and more demands on organisational sustainability and effective risk management, HR managers are expected to fulfil a greater set of responsibilities that provides – among other criteria – employees who're actually able to do their jobs and exceed the traditional expectations.
For human capital managers to achieve this, they'll need to redesign their new HR requirements. Integrated health and group wellness programmes is one example where HR managers need to address the employees' health risks and try to promote employee wellness as a form of social sustainability.
What are the real benefits of employee wellness programmes?
As a test to determine the extent to which organisations are able to claim its state of 'workplace wellness', in the first semester of 2012 Be Well Programme published its Workplace Wellness Programme Evaluation Report.
HR managers at participating organisations in Southern Africa completed an online questionnaire about their:
- employee wellness programme design,
- content, and
- administration.
This wellness programme evaluation included aspects such as the effective development, implementation and management of various workplace wellness programmes.
Among many of its benefits, participants agreed that the programme outlined international best practices for the various elements of successful wellness programmes.
| Highest scored best practices | Score | Lowest scored best practices | Score |
| Health promotion interventions | 71% | Wellness programme committes | 27% |
| Wellness programme strategy | 58% | Operational plans | 28% |
| Workplace practices | 58% | Data and information management | 41% |
Figure 1: Evaluation of employee wellness programmes
As a best practice, it's clear that organisations do invest significant resources in employee health promotion interventions and it was found to be the highest-scoring element among all of the best practices. Programme strategy and workplace practices were ranked high but didn't overly score.
On the negative side, most participating organisations didn't have a formally appointed wellness programme committee to manage the wellness programme. The effectiveness and cohesion of wellness programme committees appear to be the biggest weakness among all participating organisations. Delving deeper, it appears that wellness programme committees aren't held responsible for the organisation's wellness programme outcomes, moreover measuring the ROI. In general, wellness programme committees also lack diverse, multi-disciplinary representatives from all levels of the organisation.
Stakeholders are considering the non-financial elements in investment decisions
As more capital is managed with socially responsible investing, more informed stakeholders, especially investors, are going beyond financial information and now also consider non-financial information in their investment decisions.
The key challenge for HR managers is to make their employee wellness strategies inseparable from their enterprise sustainability. It's especially important since sustainable social development is a challenge that entails - among other factors - international and national laws, urban planning and social responsibility. In essence, they sustainably manage the direct and indirect, financial and non-financial impact that's made on employee wellness, the families of employees, the community and the environment.
