“The Chief People Officer has become the most important Executive next to the CEO because the wellbeing of employees is paramount for the functioning of the business.”
Arianna Huffington
“If you are in the people function, you need to be authentic, you need to be accessible and frankly, you need to be the champion for the wellbeing of your people.”
Donna Morris

Recently, on the Digital HR Leaders podcast, we were fortunate enough to be joined by two fantastic leaders – Arianna Huffington, Global Founder and CEO of Thrive Global and Donna Morris, CHRO at Walmart. David, Arianna and Donna discussed

How the role of the Chief People Officer has changed since the beginning of the pandemic
What the impact of these increased expectations has had on Chief People Officers themselves
The lessons in workforce agility Walmart has learned from hiring over 500,000 associates so far in the crisis and how they will carry these learnings forward
How to adopt the mindset to find opportunity in ambiguity and why it is important that Leaders set the tone
What HR can do in 2021 and beyond, to capture more value for the business

In this blog, we’re going to take a closer look at one topic that was top of mind throughout the episode: employee wellbeing. We’ll look at:

1. Why wellbeing should be a company priority

The ‘happy worker–productive worker’ theory dates back nearly a century. It posits that employees high in well-being also perform well, and vice versa.

At Walmart, the ‘happy worker-productive worker’ theory seems to be working. “I can tell you the retention rate of talent across Walmart is right now, extremely strong. Why? Because people know we care. They know that it is not just what they are doing, it is how they are doing it. And they know that the organisation is focused on the associate experience. I believe that one of the biggest, I will call it returns on investment, is reinforcing the importance of people to your organisation,” says Donna.

The business case for employee wellbeing is clear, with prolific research demonstrating the correlation between wellbeing and performance. One meta-analysis demonstrated not only the correlation between the two, but that it does not matter which level you provide employees with resources to address wellbeing – the individual level, group level, leader level or organisational level. In other words, whatever organisations can do to address employee wellbeing, they should do.

“People are going to say that a competitive advantage as an employer will be do you care about your people enough to have programs that really allow them to integrate work and life, so they can be their best version of themselves? And if you do, you are going to be able to attract, retain and hopefully optimise the performance of your company more effectively to do that”, continues Donna.

2. Problematic corporate cultures that promote hard work over health

Workplace wellbeing has shot up the corporate agenda during the Covid-19 pandemic as the boundaries between worklife and homelife blurred beyond recognition. Recent data on the state of employee burnout (see below), however, begs the question, is ‘wellbeing’ really being addressed? Or are organisations more likely focused on keeping cases of Covid-19 low and improving health and safety protocols to reduce the spread of Covid-19, over the holistic wellbeing of employees? Are organisations unwittingly promoting the idea that those who can work, should – all day, during what used to be their commute time and into the night if they’re in lockdown with nothing better to do?

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Employee wellbeing has been an area requiring focus long before the pandemic and will be long afterwards. Many corporate cultures promote an environment that demands hard work at the risk of health. “All of us were brought up on the mindset that in order to be super successful and amazing at our jobs, we need to power through exhaustion, be always on, sacrifice ourselves and our own health,” says Arianna.

Now researchers are investigating the relationship between ‘burnout’ – “a syndrome combining exhaustion (at physical, cognitive, and emotional levels), resentful detachment and withdrawal from work (e.g., cynical attitudes toward work and colleagues)” – and depression. The results are significant. In response to the research, Adam Grant writes, “It’s time to recognise burnout as a medical condition”.

3. Technology's emerging role in understanding workplace wellbeing

“In today’s world of remote and hybrid work, it’s not sufficient to only encourage self-care. We need to innovate and leverage technology to help employees operationalize much-needed breaks into their daily routines.” Kathleen Hogan, Chief People Officer at Microsoft

Technology is playing an important role, providing evidence to further educate organisations about the impact of employee wellbeing on performance. Microsoft recently conducted research with 14 employees, asking them to take part in video meetings while wearing electroencephalogram (EEG) equipment – a cap to monitor the electrical activity in their brains. The results were clear: stress accumulates over time if you don’t allow the brain time to “reset” between meetings. When participants were given a chance to rest using meditation between meetings, they went into their next meeting more relaxed, with no build up of stress even with four meetings in a row.

“Our research shows breaks are important, not just to make us less exhausted by the end of the day, but to actually improve our ability to focus and engage while in those meetings,” says Michael Bohan, senior director of Microsoft’s Human Factors Engineering group, who oversaw the project.

Arianna told David, “Now we have an enormous amount of new science that shows unequivocally that for the human operating system, unlike machines and software, downtime is a feature not a bug. We also see that for athletes, recovery is part of peak performance. Tom Brady would not have won a Superbowl in his forties, if he had not been taking care of his body and his emotional health, the way he has been doing and writing and speaking about it.”

“So, we are at this amazing moment,” Arianna continues, “where we can have a science-based, data-driven transformation and what makes me most optimistic is some of the new neuroscience that shows that while stress is unavoidable, there is nobody who can look to their employees and say “Hey, I promise you a stress-free existence here.” But cumulative stress is avoidable, and it is cumulative stress, that is the killer.”

4. How to take 'microsteps' to tackle cumulative stress

“Traditionally we think of health and wellbeing in terms of new year resolutions, big commitments we make to go to the gym an hour a day or cut out sugar entirely and of course within two or three weeks, we drop them and then feel ashamed. Then it is harder to get back on the horse,” says Arianna.

In comparison to big commitments, the intervention in the Microsoft research was small: a 10-minute break to engage in a mediation activity. These small interventions break up the cumulation of stress.

This is why Thrive tackles employee wellbeing with small, incremental changes. ‘Microsteps,’ developed at Thrive, are small daily choices that have a transformative impact on people’s wellbeing.

Walmart implemented Thrive’s behaviour change technology in 2020, launching to 100,000 distribution centre workers, to help them make small, healthier choices each day in an attempt to combat the cumulative stress rising during the pandemic. The results are telling: 97% of Walmart associates who participated reported they are now taking more time to manage their own stress, build resilience and help others to do the same.

5. The role of the CHRO in supporting employee wellbeing

It is important for senior leadership to role model the behaviours and strategies to improve employee wellbeing. Donna, for example, wrote publicly about the microsteps that she introduced – replacing diet cokes with water and doing 20 minutes of movement a day, for example. This transparency is “transformational in a culture when people are looking up to the CHRO for cultural permission,” says Arianna.
“The most important thing CHROs can do is prioritise this culture of physical and emotional wellbeing” Arianna Huffington

Upholding this transparency requires courage, certainly, empathy and tactical skills such as storytelling and communication.

It’s high time to rethink corporate cultures that revere burnout as a sign that you’ve “given it your all”. Instead, creating cultures that promote creativity, inclusion and innovation, but also respect that these are the first things to go when employees are overworked and running on empty.

As Arianna says, “The silver lining of this terrible year of grief and so many losses for millions of people, is that we are having this once in a generation opportunity to rethink work and to rethink the way we live so that we avoid the stress and burnout epidemic and the mental health crisis, that frankly pre-date the pandemic. They became worse during the pandemic, but they were there beforehand and now we have an opportunity to address them and use this crisis as a catalyst for fundamental change.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline Styr is the Research Director at Insight222. She is a thought-leader, researcher and writer on people analytics and the future of HR. Prior to joining Insight222, she worked at the Center for the Future of Work where she was an advisor and in-demand speaker on topics related to the future of work. She has also held roles in digital services and transformation consulting at Cognizant. Contact Caroline at caroline.styr@insight222.com

What is the Role of the CHRO in Improving Employee Wellbeing?