Magnetic Thought Report: Happy and healthy at work

The world we’re shaping tomorrow through the trends emerging today. Continuing our series on the big topics on leaders’ minds, next in our series of articles we are chatting about empowering the distributed workforce. If you missed our series, catch up with Trend #1 Green by Design, Trend #2 New Digital Worlds, Trend #3 Tech and Touch, and Trend #4 Empowering the Distributed Workforce.

A holistic and personalised approach to employee wellbeing

A 2023 study showed that work-related stress, burnout and poor mental health are leading to 23.3m sick days a year, costing the UK economy £28bn. Around half of us (49%) have taken time off because of stress. In young people and older people it’s even higher: 66% of 16 to 25-year-olds
and 72% of over-55s.

Workers in the public sector are more likely to experience burnout or work-related stress than in the private sector. High earners are more likely to experience work stress and low moods. There is a gap between senior leaders and employees taking time for their wellbeing: 91% at director level and above say they can but that drops to 76% for managers and only 66% for non-managers.

There’s also a gap between how employees feel and how their employers think they feel. In a Deloitte survey, only a third of employees said their health improved in 2023; most of them said it stayed the same or got worse. Yet three-quarters of C-suite leaders inaccurately thought their workforce’s health had improved.

The good news is that nearly all employees say that emotional wellness (95%) and physical wellness (94%) improve their satisfaction and productivity at work. People who are supported at work are twice as likely to be happy and almost 3.5x more likely to be flourishing. Among employees who are given support, 70% say it helps to alleviate stress.

It’s important for talent retention too. A 2023 Gympass survey of 5,000 employees in nine countries found that 96% seek employers who prioritise wellbeing, 93% say it’s as important as salary, and 87% would consider leaving if the company doesn’t focus on wellbeing.

This all adds up to the need and opportunity for employers to do more, and the potential for big, mutually positive, benefits.

Inspiring Examples: The happiest workplaces are ones where people feel trusted, their voice is heard, their opinions are valued, management’s actions match their words, they can bring their whole self to work and feel they have equal opportunities to reach their full potential.

Winners of The Sunday Times’ Best Places to Work awards in 2023 included Octopus Energy, Churchill Retirement Living, Veolia, Pizza Express, Fat Face, David Lloyd Leisure and EasyJet Holidays. OVO was voted best place to work for women, Arcadia for minority ethnic groups, Thomas Franks for LGBTQIA+ and the Goring Hotel in London for employees over 55.

Two areas of opportunity

Holistic wellbeing. This goes beyond physical and mental health to include financial, menopause support and community. An Unmind survey of 2,000 UK adults found that for 53% of us, the costs of living and housing are negatively affecting our ability to do our jobs. While the stigma around poor mental health is decreasing and more employers include
support in benefits packages, there’s more to do.

• RTO flexibility. Working location matters – not whether it’s the office or home, but whether it’s the person’s preferred location. Mismatched employees (who work remotely but prefer in-office or vice versa) have more stress, sleep loss and lower emotional wellbeing than matched employees, whose wellness and productivity improves by working in their preferred environment. It shows how individual our wellbeing is and the need for understanding as more companies return to the office.
• Mental health. One in five workers can’t manage stress and pressure in the workplace, and a third of managers feel out of their depth supporting people with mental health concerns. Solutions could include a mental wellbeing strategy, training for managers, mental health first aiders, and paid mental health leave.
• Financial wellbeing. Financial stress and uncertainty is making it hard for some of us to cope at work, affecting our productivity, sleep and wellbeing. We need support structures in the workplace, with meaningful solutions, training for managers and a culture where money is not taboo. Talking about money may be uncomfortable, but nearly all of us have been affected and not talking about it means staff (and potentially their work) are suffering.

AI in wellness. AI is the natural next step in corporate wellness programmes, moving from one-size-tries-to-fit-all to AI-powered programmes, tools and chatbots that can give employees personalised advice and recommendations based on their individual data and needs.

• Personalised wellness programmes: AI-driven tools that identify an employee’s needs and tailor the results and suggestions accordingly e.g. mental health support, fitness or personal development. Or using AI to design personalised programmes in minutes e.g. ways to alleviate stress that are specific to the person’s role and team dynamics.
• Supporting HR/People teams, by using AI to process and analyse large volumes of employee data quickly, freeing them up to focus on tasks that require humans, such as creating empathetic strategies and spending time listening to people.

Magnetic Example: Balance: an empowering menopause support app. Menopause impacts 50% of the world’s population yet it’s still an underserved area of healthcare. With the help of hundreds of people during the design and testing process, we created an app that was inspired, informed and designed by the audience who would be using it. The group valued the chance to shape exactly what the product looked like and how it worked.

Working with leading menopause practitioners we designed Balance. It’s a human-centric solution that gives people help and support to take control of their bodies and their health at perimenopause and menopause. In the first eight months alone, it had 80,000+ sign-ups in 150 countries and is now the number one menopause support app on Apple and Android, available to individuals or corporate programmes.

CEOs POV: Happy and healthy at work.

Many factors go into creating a workplace with all the conditions needed for people to thrive but for me the overarching one is the quality of empathy.

When we make the effort to see and understand each other on a human, emotional level, it leads to a positive, supportive culture with open communication, where we listen to each other, feel we can speak up, want to help each other, have emotional support, can be ourselves, give and receive feedback, and are happy when our colleagues are successful.

Empathy creates psychological safety too, so that people feel safe to talk about problems, put ideas forward or ask for help, without worrying that they’ll be judged.

For leaders, having empathy means recognising people’s work and their achievements. When someone notices and cares, it helps individuals to feel seen and appreciated. It means understanding that people have lives outside of work, which leads to flexible, supportive and human-centred practices and policies that support this.

Of course as businesses we need to be profitable and we want (I hope) to do work with purpose and meaning, but to do that we need our people to be happy and healthy. This is more than a trend! Money is not the sole measure of success and I think empathy and putting people first will always be the foundation of a thriving business.

This is an exert from our latest Thought Report, the full report can be downloaded here.

Author: Jenny Burns, Magnetic CEO

Jenny is always happy to talk about the issues teams and businesses are facing, and how we can unpack problems together to find and design for unmet needs. Coffee? Email jenny.burns@wearemagnetic.com.