Towards the close of the 20th century, the nature of occupational health risks changed. Physical exposures, dangerous and physically exerting jobs, were much less prominent, while the psychosocial work environment became the primary source of job-related health risks.
According to the State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report, “employee engagement and wellbeing remain very low, and it’s holding back enormous growth potential”. Evidently, Ipsos’s December 2020 Survey demonstrated tendencies that were already visible in pre-pandemic 2019 — when 66% of Malaysians reported leading a sedentary lifestyle, 90% claimed they ate an unhealthy diet, and 53% slept fewer than seven hours each night.
The question then arises; should employers focus on an employee’s wellbeing? If yes, as workers have returned to their physical workplaces and firms ease back into full operation in the “new normal”, how can employers encourage and support their employees to sustain a healthy wellbeing?
Employee Well-Being Makes Good Business Sense –” Win-Win” All Round
Prominent economists from the University of Warwick did extensive study which suggested that a positive work environment may increase output by 12%. In contrast, the researchers discovered that unsatisfied employees were up to 10% less productive. Essentially, happy, healthy workers are beneficial to the company. As a consequence, companies like Google invest more in employee assistance and employee happiness.
However, employee wellbeing extends beyond monetary compensation, paid vacation, and bonuses. Other intangible advantages supplied by the organisation, such as an encouraging and fulfilling work environment, health initiatives and career development also contribute to employee satisfaction and retention. For the purposes of this discussion, we will consider how job control and autonomy plays a vital role in an employee’s wellbeing.
Job Control & Autonomy
Unfortunately, many managers are ineffective in coaching and facilitating their employees to improve their performance, leading to an all-too-common practice of micromanagement in the workplace. Researchers discovered that autonomy significantly predicts indicators of well-being including intrinsic drive and life-purpose (Hackman and Oldham, 1976). Therefore, a negative effect on a worker’s health and wellbeing might be expected when the workplace and its surroundings violate autonomy. The discussion below considers how employers may leverage on technology to prevent micromanaging employees.
Practice Delegating – Leveraging on Technology
Without proper delegation skills, you run the risk of unwittingly micromanaging your staff. It’s crucial to provide workers with assignments that cater to their interests and ambitions while also providing them with opportunities to develop professionally. According to Gallup’s study, top-performing CEOs in the art of delegation saw a 33% increase in revenue. Executives may concentrate on the tasks that will provide the greatest financial rewards to the firm if they delegate part of their responsibilities to lower-level workers, who will in turn feel empowered and more appreciated.
i) Buurtzorg – Case Study
Buurtzorg, the biggest supplier of home health care in the Netherlands, employs almost 10,000 registered nurses. The company’s activities are only managed by a small corporate office of around 50 employees and a group of 25 coaches, as opposed to a complicated, multi-layered structure. Alternatively, the organisation relies on an IT platform called BuurtzorgWeb to organise the nurses.
Surprisingly, the nurses of Buurtzorg are not continually watched, supervised, and trained by management-implemented technologies and algorithms. Instead, they are self-organised into a thousand distinct self-managed teams tasked with delivering home care within a certain geographical region. Teams have no designated leader, make decisions by consensus, and recruit and dismiss members independently.
BuurtzorgWeb enables these teams by giving templates for self-management, such as hosting team meetings and navigating difficult team dynamics. It also gives each team with all the information they need to analyse their own performance, including team productivity, client and team member happiness, and team atmosphere ratings. Perhaps most crucially, the platform acts as a central hub that links all the teams and enables each nurse to express concerns and queries and exchange ideas. In this approach, the platform facilitates dispersed learning and promotes the ideas of those at the forefront.
ii) VkusVill – Case Study
VkusVill, the fastest-growing retail food chain in Russia, is structured as a network of over 1,200 autonomous convenience shops, each of which is controlled by a team of 5 to 10 individuals with broad decision-making autonomy, including what items and promotions to provide. To provide this degree of independence, VkusVill has its own specialised IT infrastructure to link retailers directly to their consumers through a suite of digital solutions (i.e. apps, social networks). Customers get an electronic receipt after each visit, on which they may rank each item on a scale of 1 to 5 and write comments.
Through these connections, each team obtains product ratings and customer feedback for their local store, which impacts their decisions about what to repurchase, where to place them on shelves, and how much to charge for them. VkusVill’s dynamic and local customer feedback and frontline staff’ access to this data sets it apart from most merchants, where both data and decision rights are owned by headquarters.
Concluding Thoughts
All these functions not only improve employee wellbeing as they are far from autocratic but are also effective for business performance. They give teams’ managerial-style guidance while leaving the choice ultimately up to them. It would be wise for employers to be reminded of this sentiment when one thinks of their employee’s wellbeing:
“The fundamental aspect of caring about your people, wanting them to live happier and healthier makes not only sense to the individual and person as such but also for the business performance.”
