Let's Push Personal Wellness For The Health Of Employees

Employees in front of a whiteboard discussing the importance of knowledge management

Personal wellness and wfh are here to stay

Personal wellness and work-from-home (WFH) arrangements are here to stay. The evolving landscape of work demands a renewed focus on the holistic well-being of employees, recognizing that wellness extends beyond physical health to encompass emotional, social, and financial dimensions.

The Challenge

Exemplar firms are looking through an institutional lens to comprehend, with compassion, the magnitude of personal loss and suffering experienced by their key stakeholders. The impact of the recent pandemic has surfaced a myriad of challenges that have affected individuals in profound ways. To garner deep insights, it will be necessary to synthesize the side effects that emerged in the aftermath of the pandemic: a heightened emphasis on the value of personal relationships, social engagement, and leisure experiences; a pronounced awareness of the impacts of anxiety and depression on physical and mental health; and an urgent inner motivation to reassess and improve overall life-happiness and career satisfaction.

Key stakeholders in firms—customers and employees—have experienced the negative effects of the pandemic in distinctly traumatic ways, causing them to struggle with their personal well-being. Employees have reported feelings of isolation, increased stress due to blurred boundaries between work and home, and concerns regarding their mental health stability. The recent crisis has not only altered work dynamics but has led many to reflect on their life choices and work environments. Unfortunately, these impacts will likely be long-lived, necessitating a thoughtful and sustained response from organizations.

News institutions have the capacity to play a uniquely supportive role and partake in the heavy lifting needed to rebuild and restore personal and family well-being. This role includes facilitating access to resources, delivering empathetic communications, and implementing wellness programs that genuinely resonate with staff and customers alike. Therefore, it is no surprise that more and more businesses are now adopting wellness programs for their employees, recognizing that investing in personal wellness correlates directly with improved employee satisfaction and productivity.

In this new normal, the pressing question arises: how can organizations make a meaningful difference in supporting their key stakeholders to live and perform more purposefully? The need for actionable strategies has never been more urgent.

The Opportunity

It has been established that institution-led delivery of health insurance, life and disability insurance, retirement plans, etc., was the turning point that stimulated their demand and use, ultimately proving to be the most effective distribution model to boost the financial well-being of customers and employees. Now, this post-pandemic environment presents an opportunity (and obligation) for businesses to similarly leverage the wherewithal of the institutional delivery model to help repair and heal the detrimental current state of personal well-being.

Organizations can take the lead in fostering a culture that values well-being at all levels by embedding wellness as a central tenet of their operational philosophy. Although well-being can be hard to evaluate and quantify, organizations have much to do to learn, adapt, and take action. Notwithstanding, there is a wide spectrum of immediate-term actions that organizations can take to demonstrate genuine care and value for the well-being of their stakeholders.

In practical terms, an institution could embed digital “self-care” offerings—those that are especially synergistic with their existing economics—into their own value propositions and offer them to strengthen the well-being of customers and employees. Some examples include:

• Countering Sleep Loss: Addressing widespread issues of post-pandemic stress, anxiety, and burnout through unlimited access to a unique sleep health app can allow employees to better manage their sleep hygiene and improve their overall mental health. Improve your daily routine to ensure a good night’s sleep. This begins with a healthy diet, and get supplements from Flawless Wellness.

• Providing Family Peace of Mind: Organizations can offer affordable access to a digital estate and legacy planning platform to empower employees to plan responsibly for their families’ futures, easing anxiety associated with financial and familial responsibilities.

• Advancing Mental Health Literacy: Businesses can implement technology-driven solutions that utilize AI to anticipate markers and triggers of distress, thereby equipping employees with the skills to handle their challenges by safely connecting them to on-demand support and specialist resources.

• Easing Financial Stress: Providing access to right-sized financial planning services tailored for the mass affluent can help employees manage their financial situations effectively, thereby reducing overall stress and improving their financial literacy and decision-making capabilities.

• Reducing Caregiving Burdens: Offering concierge services aimed at assisting employees with time-consuming family caregiving responsibilities—such as at-need elder care support—can mitigate the physical and emotional burden felt, particularly among the sandwich generation.

• Managing Bereavement Challenges: Personalized assistance during times of grief, such as help with funeral arrangements using a hybrid platform that combines human interaction with technology, can help employees navigate a difficult time with support and respect.

The point is that institutions have quickly learned that boundaries between work and personal spaces have been irreversibly reshaped, and that key stakeholders now place disproportionately higher emphasis on relational factors versus transactional ones. Good relationships, mutual respect, and empathy are now recognized as fundamental components of a healthy organizational culture.

Consequently, personal and family wellness elements, such as elder care services, in-home nursing, and estate/legacy planning, are now surfacing as desirable benefits. Organizations will do well to reexamine the importance of incorporating such personal and family wellness elements into their value propositions to better align with the emerging priorities of their employees and customers.

Clearly, the pandemic has upended many old transactional conventions, and businesses are now tasked with selecting and implementing relational replacements that are better suited to delivering societal impact while also enhancing the economic performance of the firm. In this new era, the emphasis on holistic well-being is not just a trend; it is an imperative for sustainable growth and success.

By embracing personal wellness as a strategic focus, organizations can create an environment that nurtures their employees, builds loyalty, and ultimately drives productivity, innovation, and long-term success.