Having so many backgrounds from which professionals enter the Health and Wellbeing profession makes it a rich, interesting place to work in terms of the people you meet at industry events (like MAD World Leaders’ Summit, coming up soon on 9th October in London – to register and find out more, see here!).
However, the lack of a ‘gold standard’ pathway has created questions around the role’s clarity and credibility, at times in the minds of senior management when it comes to securing budget (discussed in this feature).
(One of the key skills cited in this article is the ability to “talk in Excel” as VP Health at Anglo American Robina McCann calls it, meaning “validated metrics”. Robina will be sharing her expertise and leading one of our roundtables at the MAD World Leaders’ Summit on 9th October in London. For more info on the agenda and to register, see here)
Acting on gut instinct
It’s also meant that, without a professional framework, some leaders have acted, sometimes, on their personal and gut instinct regarding what works. It’s led to a disparate, individualistic approach to strategy in certain cases, reflected in the many different, sometimes-confused job ads in this space (more on this in a future feature soon).
“Leaders often default to their own lived experience as a reference point. Wellbeing is inherently personal and contextual, and drawing from personal experience can feel like a natural way to empathise and respond, especially in emotionally sensitive situations,” says Hannah Pearsall, Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing at Hays.
“But relying on gut instinct for wellbeing is risky and naïve, no high-performing leader would ignore data and evidence in finance or strategy, so why would you do that for Wellbeing?”
The lack of an established career pathway has also led to many individuals feeling at sea, and not sure where to focus their efforts. As Daniel Chan, Senior Wellbeing and Employee Experience Manager at insurance group QBE, who is a nurse by background, says:
“We’ve come from all different walks of life and navigated ourselves to get where we are today. But this also brings a lot of ambiguity and inconsistency as there is no clear industry or career pathways for a Wellbeing professional. It’s important to identify what you need to know and the steps to grow.”
Moves afoot to create a framework…
This ambiguity is set to change as there are various moves in the industry afoot to create professional frameworks for the career pathway for a Health and Wellbeing professional. For instance, Affinity Health at Work, SuperWellness and the Wellbeing Lead Academy are all in various stages of creating a framework and/or delivering qualifications that satisfy this (see this feature for more information).
However, as interviewees have pointed out to us, sometimes it’s not possible to find the time or money to invest in professional qualifications – so we’ve spoken to all three companies creating frameworks to ask them about the kind of skills that professionals most need to focus on to grow in their roles and to up their credibility in the eyes of other specialisms.
To grow in their roles this is where Health and Wellbeing professionals need to develop their skills…..
1.Skill: Ability to work from an evidence base
Ensure you are grounding decisions and any spend on reliable data, research and interventions that have been proven to work.
This can be tricky in Health and Wellbeing, which is an emerging professional discipline but it’s possible.
As well as gathering your own data as a way to show strategies work, you can source peer-reviewed studies, meta-analyses and guidance from credible sources such as NICE, HSE, WHO, CIPD, ACAS, IOSH and BITC.
There are also various academic hubs specialising in wellbeing producing research such as The Lancet, University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, Institute of Employment Studies, Affinity Health at Work Library and Hub and King’s College London Centre for Military Health Research.
The World Wellbeing Movement, for instance, partnered with the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford and carried out a multidisciplinary systematic literature review of more than 3,000 academic studies assessing the efficacy of workplace interventions designed to drive workplace wellbeing.
“The frustrating thing is that the evidence is out there, there just isn’t enough shouting about it,” says Elliot Foster, Head of Wellbeing, SuperWellness, who is leading the development of the SuperWellness professional framework and also has been conducting his own evidence reviews.
The evidence base is improving all the time, with organisations like Affinity Health at Work committing to developing it to support professionals and organisations. As part of its work developing a professional framework, for instance, it is conducting a comprehensive evidence and literature review, running focus groups and interviews and a large scale survey, led by its research consortium of institutions and organisations.
Rachel Lewis, co-managing partner at Affinity Health at Work explains:
“If we are going to develop a framework for the profession, we have got put our money where our mouth is and use rigorous, evidence based methodologies to do this. We’ve also got to bring the different sources of evidence and insight together to foster a common agreement about what we need, which is why we are working in collaboration with HSE, IOSH, CIPD, SOM and industry experts to develop this framework.”
Foster explains why evidence is such a crucial part of raising the discipline’s game:
“If you’ve got people that are not well informed, not using evidence-based practice, you get poor impact or no impact. Senior leaders see that and say ‘oh well, I’m not going to give you budget or autonomy’. That’s when you just get ‘tickbox’ wellbeing work and, eventually, no impact and completely pulled budget. By focusing on what the evidence says works, and applying it to our organisations, we can start to change senior leader perception of what workplace wellbeing is.”
Or as Founder of the Wellbeing Lead Academy, Emily Pearson, says:
“Don’t follow trends, follow actual theories.”
2. Skill: Ability to show the impact of your work
The FT famously (or, rather, infamously) ran an article headlined ‘Your Wellbeing plans don’t work’, about 18 months ago, which gained a huge amount of traction.
It said that most wellbeing programmes fail to produce meaningful results related to business outcomes. Some CEOs and commentators used it as ammunition to argue against the case for spending on wellbeing initiatives.
However, if you dug into the findings you’d see that the programmes they analysed were mostly focused on lifestyle changes outside work, individual interventions that employees could take, rather than addressing systemic issues about work design.
As Lewis says:
“There are now strong business cases from the likes of Deloitte and WHO which show that if organisations invest in the right kind of interventions to support and protect wellbeing, they can get a return on investment of over £5 for every £1 spent. To get this, Wellbeing Professionals need to understand what interventions work and where to focus efforts.”
To reclaim the narrative, Wellbeing Professionals need to concentrate on collecting data, quantitative and qualitative, which shows the impact of structural changes on employee health and wellbeing
This could be: workload, ability to work flexibly, access to adjustments, job crafting opportunities, financial education, training line managers better in spotting signs of stress, creating a psychologically safe culture, including Wellbeing KPIs in board level discussions, etc.
Impact can be shown via metrics like productivity levels increasing, improved retention rates, lower recruitment costs, higher employee engagement, for example. What’s important, says Foster, is that “it makes impact tangible and compelling against competing financial investment or saving decisions”.
3.Skill: Ability to talk in the CEOs’ language
McCann, of Anglo American who is leading a panel at MAD World Leaders’ Summit on 9th October, argues that most professionals are naturally “narrative” talkers, who lean towards storytelling which is hugely powerful, but must be combined with hard facts and figures when talking to senior management. This is often an area where professionals are said to be lacking.
“Often professionals don’t understand how to talk the CEO’s language and don’t know how to start that conversation with them about, for example, how productivity and engagement links to Health and Wellbeing,” says Pearson.
4.Skill: Ability to embed new systems and approaches across the whole business
Rather than focus on one-off ‘initiatives’ or ‘awareness days’ or, even, mental health champions and first aiders, Leaders need to put their energy into organisational change, which comes from embedding Wellbeing strategies in the day to day experience of employees.
This means developing skills in cross-function collaboration, conflict management and, even, how to tell a good story (with the numbers, as discussed already!) and be persuasive. We have written many inspiring articles on this recently because these are such hot topics, from a piece by a hostage negotiator to one by a global mediator…
It also means, at times, you may have to push back on senior management if they try and pigeon hole Health and Wellbeing into ‘awareness days’ or one-off interventions. Professionals may need to become adept at educating colleagues about what Health and Wellbeing actually is (ie. not fluffy!) and at effectively breaking down siloes.
5.Skill: critical thinking
Especially with AI taking more and more of a prominent role in our working lives, professionals must develop the ability to think critically at all times – questioning, not only what AI says, but our own thinking (see this feature for more on this).
For instance, when setting strategy, do you know what you are actually trying to achieve and how you’re going to measure it, before you start? Are these the right objectives and metrics? Have you got any evidence they are?
This is a particularly important point for professionals who have entered the profession due to lived experience rather than evidence-based qualifications.
As Pearson says:
“Lived experience is absolutely important but it’s only one person’s perspective and experience. What you generally find is that a certain intervention has worked for someone, that is all they’ll advocate for. ”
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