MAD World 2024: 3 ways to genuinely engage employees in Health & Wellbeing

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It can be a real struggle to engage employees in the topic of Health & Wellbeing, and encourage them to dedicate time to learning, as identified at MAD World 2024 as one of the major issues in the sector.

As discussed in this feature, while the government and industry appear to be on the same wavelength when it comes to a preventative approach to employee Health & Wellbeing, many individual employees are currently less convinced. This is reflected in low engagement rates across the board, which many delegates talked about in the informal conversations between sessions.

Alarming statistics show need for Health & Wellbeing support

However, the many alarming statistics quoted about rising rates of mental health problems, causing people to drop out of the workforce, would suggest that employees desperately need help managing their emotional wellbeing.

The fact that employees often don’t seek help until they’re at crisis point – when it’s harder, more expensive and more time consuming to recover – would also suggest there is a worrying knowledge gap that needs filled. But how do we convince them of the benefit of filling it?

Personalisation & better buying of services

In this article we also discussed potential ways to engage employees more effectively. We touched on personalising interventions, getting better at buying personalised and quality solutions at a corporate level, and getting into the ‘beginner’s’ mindset of employees, who often have far less knowledge than professionals in the industry.

Here are three other suggestions discussed at MAD World for engaging employees more effectively in Health & Wellbeing campaigns and resources.

1. Focus first on increasing ‘health literacy’ of employees

“The basic foundation of mental health is literacy,” said Dr Nicola Eccles, Head of Mental Health and Wellbeing at On Wellbeing, at MAD World. “But what we’ve done [as an industry] is go straight into the solutions that are not that relatable, or relevant, to most people. We all know the lingo. We know what we’re talking about. We’re really switched on to health, wellness and mental health. The average person is not.”

She likens the situation to presenting employees with a chess set and asking them to play chess, telling them it’s good for them, when they’ve never played before. 

“It’s puzzling and irrelevant. And if you’re at work and something feels puzzling and irrelevant, and it’s not actually going to affect your wage, then there’s other things you are going to do,” she said.

The problem here is not the solutions per se. As Dr Eccles says, many organisations have fantastic resources available but they just aren’t landing with employees.

“I’ve talked to so many different organisations who are trying so hard to make something stick, but it isn’t,” she added.

In order for it to ‘stick’ better, employees have to really understand the topic so they understand the benefit to them. As Dr Eccles said, many employees still have “blinkers on” when it comes to mental health and others don’t understand why mental health is now being talked about so much at work.

“The issue is that we haven’t ever stopped and really helped them to get more literate around the subject. That’s what we need to do,” she said.

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As a starting point for this, she suggests explaining that, rather than a confusing “anomaly”, having good mental health is actually about acquiring a set of skills which will be extremely useful in life, personally and professionally. Talking in practical, concrete terms rather than theoretical or intangible language will help boost understanding.

“All the research shows,” said Dr Eccles. “That when we increase mental health literacy, it predicts help-seeking attitudes. That means you’ll increase footfall to your existing provisions.”

2. Embed Health & Wellbeing in work, and leverage AI

One of the solutions which delegates shared had helped with engagement was making Health & Wellbeing a normalised part of the working day. 

Some speakers and delegates, for example, talked about integrating conversations about Health and Wellbeing into catch-ups with line managers. “So basically this ensures that this kind of literacy is part of the culture, rather than about doing one-off training or using a tool the company provides,” said Dr Eccles.

Others talked about taking five minutes at the start of a group meeting to talk about a particular theme, or even do a breathing exercise together. Again, introducing this kind of thing prematurely without doing the groundwork around the benefits and increasing health literacy, could result in employees dismissing it as irrelevant, puzzling or even ridiculous. 

To get over this, speaker Reeva Misra, Founder and CEO of Walking on Earth (WONE) in her session on ‘Bringing measurement to prevent epmloyee burnout’, said it’s useful to put the data into the employee’s hands. She actually started off her MAD World session by getting the audience to do a breathing exercise together, which she calls a ”micromoment”. 

Even though I am fully bought-in to practical tools like this, I admit I felt slightly uncomfortable standing up to do this in a conference setting because it’s not (yet) “normal” behaviour. However, she said once employees see the physiological impact of small but frequent interventions like this, they start to change their minds:

“If you have a wearable device, we can show you how your heart rate has changed from the beginning to the end of the exercise. On average we see a 10% reduction in heart rate, even for an exercise as short as two minutes. What often surprises people is how building in these moments of recovery into a stressful day doesn’t require hours of practice or training to move from a heightened physiological state to a calmer one.”

She argued that the advancements in AI can help hugely in putting the power in the individual’s hands – literally – for managing their stress and preventing burnout. By monitoring their body’s reactions to situations, employees will then be able to take preventative or balancing action. You don’t need to convince them either – the data does this by itself.

“We’re at a really interesting time in history where we’re able to proactively measure our health with the proliferation of wearables,” she said. “We’re now at a place where it is possible to measure our health preventatively.”

WONE then combines self-reported and physiological data around stress with contextual data, making it possible to identify what interventions are actually relieving employees’ stress, as well as what triggers stress in their working environments.

“We then use that data to draw new insights to help individuals better understand their own levels of stress, but also help them with personalised recommendations so that they can improve their stress over time,” she said.

3. Create cultural change at industry level

It’s incredibly difficult for one company, no matter how well-meaning it is, to change their culture completely if they operate within a wider, toxic industry culture. In this case, the most effective action you can potentially take is to join forces with other companies (yes, potentially your competitors, which are most likely to share your goal) and instigate change on a higher level.

The legal industry is doing this with its Mindful Business Charter. MAD World hosted a particular discussion on this in relation to “humanising” one of the most notoriously cut-throat areas of law, litigation. 

Speakers talked openly about the traditional culture of sending aggressive legal letters at 5.30pm on a Friday, known colloquially as the “Friday night special”. This is a tactic purposely meant to ruin the recipient’s weekend, but is also not a very life-affirming action for the sender to experience, either.

Changing this kind of ingrained culture ultimately comes down to individuals taking individual actions which collectively become a powerful, accessible alternative way to behave.

Naomi Pryde, Partner and Head of Litigation, Regulation & Arbitration, Scotland, DLA Piper LLP, was part of the team that co-created the litigation guidance, as part of the Charter, which applies to all forms of dispute resolution. As a result of doing this, she has changed her behaviour by, for example, considering more carefully what letters she is prepared to put her name to.

“Sometimes people will write letters in your name. An associate recently came to me with a letter, and I said: ‘I can’t sign that. I can’t put my name to that. That is unnecessarily aggressive, and that isn’t going to take us where we need to be’,” she said. 

“I am mindful of the objectives of the Charter and what I’m now putting my name to, so it’s definitely affected and influenced what I am prepared to sign off.”

She will now look, too, to see if the opposing legal firm that she’s liaising with has also signed the Mindful Business Charter. If it has, she will sometimes phone them and say:

“I noticed that you’re also a signatory of the Mindful Business Charter. Are you aware of the litigation guidance? Do you want to agree some rules of engagement? Often people are happy to do that.”

That might mean that although the court timetable stipulates correspondence be sent by 4pm on a Friday, firms can agree to exchange it by noon on Thursday, to give all parties time to absorb the information before the weekend.

But behaviour change on this scale is a slow burn and will require persistent, patient perseverance. As Pryde said, sometimes a firm is a signatory but “they are not living by the principles”, which is obviously frustrating but also an inevitable part of the change process.

However, by virtue of having the Charter in the first place, it begins a discussion point and plants a seed in everyone’s mind, even though some minds will take longer to change than others.

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