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Webinar: Building a holistic employee well-being experience for employees

The corporate wellness experience should no longer be limited to these traditional perks because studies indicate that the Millennial & Gen-Z workforce is more inclined towards well-being and purpose at work compared to earlier generations.

Keeping this in view organizations should focus more on implementing a comprehensive strategy that deeply integrates health, well-being, engagement, and incentives into the overall employee experience.

In this webinar hosted by Thrilok Abhishek - AVP, ekincare, speakers Ben O'Sullivan - Sales Director - Europe Xoxoday, Atma Godara - Lead - Digital HR Transformation, OYO, and Priyambi Malvai - Head - Total Rewards and Performance Management, Times Internet focused on helping organizations develop the right strategy for holistic well-being experience for employees.

How this new normal has impacted employee well-being across organizations

In this perspective, Ms. Priyambi rightly pointed out that this ongoing situation has been unprecedented in many ways and has built up a lot of stress among employees, be it financial stress or not having any social connection of any kind or even mental stress for that matter of fact. Up until now, employee well-being used to have three aspects: Physical, mental & emotional, and financial wellness. But these last four months have opened up a new paradigm for organizations making social well-being equally important for employees. 

Work from home has brought dual responsibilities to employees, as there is really no boundary between where work begins or stops, and where home begins or stops.

Ms. Priyambi aptly said that "While we brought work home, we are not sure if we brought the organization home". 

New organizational ways of engaging employees

In this regard, Ben O'Sullivan feels that until now engagement used to be about retention of employees and productivity but engagement has taken on a new meaning now for the HRs and business leaders. Managing this problem of remote working to taking care of employees' well-being driven by safety concerns and anxiety is all that accounts for employee engagement. 

Mr. Ben also shares that the most sort of agile people-centric companies quickly adopted an annual survey, ad hoc homegrown surveys, or even initiated pulse surveys essentially to measure the problem when everybody was just trying to understand what was going on in the early days of COVID-19 spread. 

Many organizations have implemented creative solutions like deploying stipends for work from home equipment, measures to tackle employee stress at home, motivate them by deploying thank you gifts, etc. Since employee engagement is all about motivation now, many organizations have changed their strategies or are working towards a new business model. 

How is work from home impacting employee productivity?

While almost every organization was been hit hard by this pandemic, employers do have a tough time figuring out if employees were really working from home or not as it was really difficult for them to measure

their productivity in this new normal, said Atma Godara. Ensuring workforce productivity while working remotely is a concern area. Organizations need to focus on building work alignment and work control through a structured work allocation and communication protocol. It is indeed the time for HR professionals to recalibrate their priorities, focus on managing the remote workforce, digitalize the HR function, and re-imagine workforce models.

As work from home becomes a new normal with every possibility of it staying much longer than expected, it is going to eventually take a toll on the mental well-being of an employee because working from the office allows employees to socialize with others while the current situation does not. So, when organizations are looking at the new normal, employers got to include social well-being as part of a practice and not just a one-off affair. So to make it as a culture, it has to be brought in as a practice and not just a policy. 

Prachi Bharadwaj is an experienced Marketing Communications Executive with a demonstrated history of working in the health tech & higher education industries.