Let’s Push Personal Wellness For The Health Of Employees

Personal wellness and wfh are here to stay.

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. 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—experienced the negative effects of the pandemic in distinctly traumatic ways, causing them to struggle with their personal well-being. Unfortunately, these impacts will likely be long-lived. 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 is the reason that more and more businesses are now adopting business wellness program for their employees.

In this new normal, how could organizations make a difference in supporting their key stakeholders to live and perform more purposefully?

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 and ultimately proved 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 institution delivery model to help repair and heal the detrimental current state of personal well-being.

Since well-being can be hard to evaluate and quantify, organizations have much to do to learn, adapt and act. 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 it to strengthen the well-being of customers and employees. Some examples include:

• Help counter sleep loss (post-pandemic stress, anxiety, burnout) through use of a unique sleep health app.

• Provide family peace of mind through affordable access to a digital estate and legacy planning platform.

• Advance mental health literacy (AI-enabled anticipation of watermarks/triggers of distress) with the ability to handle challenges by safely connecting to on-demand support and specialist resources.

• Ease financial stress through access to right-sized financial planning services designed for the needs of the mass affluent (e.g., reduce debt burden).

• Reduce physical and mental burden through concierge services for time-consuming family caregiving responsibilities (e.g., at-need elder care support for sandwich generation).

• Manage challenges brought on by bereavement through personalized help (e.g., funeral arrangements using a hybrid human and technology platform model).

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.

Consequently, personal and family wellness elements such as elder care/in-home nursing and estate/legacy planning are now surfacing as desirable benefits. Accordingly, 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 employees and customers.

Clearly, the pandemic has upended many old transactional conventions, and businesses are up to the task of selecting and implementing relational replacements that are better suited do both—deliver a societal impact while also enhancing the economic performance of the firm.