FEATURE BEYOND FREE BANANAS


Beyond free bananas W


HAT COMES TO mind when you hear the words ‘workplace wellbeing’? If you automatically think of fruit baskets, free massages


and playful Silicon Valley office space, you are not alone. I know, because I recently spent time listening to the ambitions and fears of business leaders on workplace wellbeing for a study funded by the National Productivity Investment Fund and the ESRC.


Quirky examples of employee perks can


make managers wonder whether it is possible to ‘go too far’ in indulging employees when it comes to promoting employee wellbeing. This is a shame, because research and reviews by the work and learning team at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing suggest that genuine attempts to promote workplace wellbeing are actually far more about doing the basics well: good communication, management and job design. These are not ‘nice to have’ extras, but the fundamental conditions for productive work. My project involved taking this message out to local factories and offices and listening to the response. Professor Kevin Daniels (lead for the work and learning stream of the What Works Centre for Wellbeing) highlighted for me key ways that organisations could improve employee wellbeing.


Opposite: The modern office is designed to make work a better place but it takes more than just open plan spaces. Below: There was a time when a few potted plants were thought to be key to improving workplace wellbeing.


To improve employee wellbeing, organisations must be genuinely interested in the employee experience and doing the basics well: good communication, management and job design – and it requires changes in culture and management style. By Dr Helen Fitzhugh


These ranged from the importance of effective signposting and support for people struggling with physical, mental or other difficulties, to fostering good relationships, to training managers and designing quality jobs. The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices


highlighted the need to concentrate on job quality at the national and local level. High-quality work involves job security, reasonable demands, a clear role, varied tasks and the opportunity to use your skills and develop new ones. Also, relationships are central to experiences at work. Think of how the way your co-workers and managers treat you can either make or break your working day. All of this may sound obvious. Yet my experience of taking this message out to workplaces showed that it needed to be said, and said loudly. "It's very thought-provoking – you are giving


me a to-do list!” said one of my participants. She was an experienced and committed professional, who wanted to hear research findings and act upon them. Her response was a reminder that actively taking the findings of social research out into the wider world has never been more pressing. As well as the direct individual benefits, employee wellbeing has been linked to higher productivity, through improvements in performance, reductions in absence and presenteeism costs, and improvements in creativity.


If a piece of machinery or a new patented


process promised all those improvements, it would be a sell-out success. Yet managers see barriers to working on wellbeing – especially if it involves making many small incremental actions, rather than purchasing a product or service. I wanted to understand these barriers and try to learn from businesses that were overcoming them. It was a small project – involving just 24 organisations across Norfolk and Suffolk – but in reaching out to large and small engineering, manufacturing and other heavier industries it reached into workplaces where health and safety is paramount, but the idea of employee wellbeing is still a relative newcomer. I identified five key challenges from my discussions with managers on how to promote employee wellbeing: Finding and investing the time required to work on the fundamentals of communication, management and job design; Knowing how to vision and plan for employee wellbeing; Understanding the workforce; Learning how to manage people; and Changing organisational culture.


18 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2018


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