Wellness at Work: An Imperative to Leverage New Normal of Organizational Culture

Why is the organizational culture in need of revampingand evolution so quickly? The answer is three-fold. Firstly, the trends in organizational culture are changing and this change is inevitable because the workforce keeps changing as well. By the year 2025, 75% of the workforce will be made up of Millennials (Bersin by Deloitte, Global Human Capital Trends, 2014). A new generation of workers will inevitably bring new values, norms and culture to an organization for which organizations need to prepare beforehand. Secondly, as workforce changes, so dotheir expectations). If the previous workforce was content with performance reviews, the workforce today wants continuous feedback, they want real-time recognition over service awards and pulse surveys instead of annual surveys, so on and so forth. Lastly, research conducted in workplaces specifically catering to employees’ mental health has generated astonishing results. For example, research conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded in 2019 that the estimated cost to the global economy is US $1 trillion per year in lost productivity due to mental illness. Another research has shown that nearly 40% of employees with mental illness take up to 10 days off per year because of it (Mental Health First Aid at Work USA).

1. Bridging top-line – Bottom-line divide
   Mapping & indexing the values, norms & practices of organizational culture and communication paves the path for a detailed roadmap for building a sustainable, high-performance organization.
2. Linking strategy with culture
   From the board room to the billboard, there is an interplay of strategic dimensions and tactical actions embedded in the human factor that needs to be paid special attention to.
3. Incubating millennials
   Millennials are the most informed generation/workforce of known history which is why contemporary insights about them are also crucial to organizational culture development.
4. Developmental intervention
   A systematic and authentic psychometric assessment will enable the developmental course of action for holistic learning and development trajectories on personal, professional & organizational levels.
5. Training and development
   Evidence-based trainings for employees, senior management and CEOs teaching them different strategies to implement wellness at work for a healthier work organizational culture.

What is the way forward for organizations to adapt to changing cultures and increasing awareness? The answer is Wellness at Work. Organizational cultures that are morewellness-oriented serve as a driving force for employees to be more productive. This means employee burnout and low performance can result from increasing amounts of stress and lack of coping strategies which is exactly what a wellness-oriented work culture attempts to tackle.To the best of my knowledge, few cause-sensitive organizations in Pakistan have identified the importance of this and have availedtele mental health services i.e. counselling and psychotherapy for their employees but such solutions don’t cater to organization-wide needs rather they handle the individual needs of the employees as of now. This is a new area of development for Pakistan where mostly personal development training entertain technical skill building instead of psychological fitness which should be taken just as importantly, if not more. Furthermore, psychological fitness is not regarded as a major construct in organizational cultures but just as a by-product of these trainings, this trend will not change until organizational cultures are woven around psychological fitness and emotional wellbeing rather than be treated as collateral. My organization, MYMACOM, has attempted to fill this gap and introduce psychological fitness of employees as a foremost priority for finding the right person for the right job through psychometric assessments and designing and delivering consultancy solutions about wellness at work. Taking the gist of these exercises which we undertook so far, following are some points that can be implemented to get higher performance from a changing workforce without compromising their mental health:

The targeted outcomes aimed to be achieved by practicing the steps above are increasing in engagement in work-related activities, a sense of cohesiveness and support, increased productivity and creativity, a safer environment for employees to share their experiences, reduced turnover and absenteeism, reduced ‘presenteeism’ (a phenomenon in which employees are at work but are not as productive due to stress, depression, injury, illness or burnout), increased potential to reduce healthcare-related costs.

Yasir Masood Afaq
CEO
MYMACOM

Yasir Masood Afaq is Mental & Occupational Health Expert and CEO of MYMACOM, a private limited company, rendering services in the wider spectrum of Applied Organizational Psychology and Founding Director of House of Wellness (HOW), which is a Mental Health Treatment & Resource Center in Islamabad.