Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Employee well-being: more serious than you may think!

Your well-being is a serious business matter. And so is your employees'. It affects profits and productivity, for better and for worse.

The pressure to undo the damage of the past few years may tempt the leaders of many businesses to focus only on the balance sheet and ignore what turns out to be a quantifiable and manageable lever that is proven to affect the bottom line: the well-being of workers. You might assume that well-being is a "soft" issue and not a management problem to solve. That would be a mistake.

It turns out that well-being, like many other management matters, is both quantifiable and manageable. After extensive research, in partnership with leading economists, psychologists, sociologists, physicians and other scientists, and various in-depth analyses, including random samples from more than 150 countries spanning 98% of the world population, the Gallup Organization have identified five universal, interconnected elements that represent what people across nationalities, faiths and cultures look for in life and what causes them to thrive. They are:

Career well-being, meaning how you occupy your time and simply liking what you do each day.

Social well-being, having strong relationships and love in your life.

Financial well-being, effectively managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase your feeling of financial security.

Physical well-being, having good health and enough energy to get things done throughout the day.

Community well-being, your sense of engagement and involvement with the area in which you live.

People with high levels of well-being in all five of these categories thrive, and those with low levels of well-being in even one category suffer. And as individuals go, so go their workplaces. When organizations invest in their employees' well-being they reap significant reductions in costs and increases in value over time.

Employees with thriving well-being are also much more likely to be engaged in their workplaces, and thus are more productive and cost-effective. Additionally, they help improve their communities and the brands of the organizations that employ them. It's clear that what's best for the employee is best for the organization. Increasing employee well-being means a more efficient and higher-performing organization. Click here to read the full article.

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