Supporting mental wellbeing in the hybrid world of work

How do organizations create diverse and focused offerings that support the mental health of their employees?

That is what Certified Top Employer Discovery discussed in a recent Top Employers Connect webinar about mental wellbeing.

In the latest of our ‘For a Better World of Work’ series, we were joined by Jabulile Nosi, Head of Employee Wellbeing at Discovery, Zonke Mashile, Business Executive at Discovery, and Ammara Naeem, Head of Client Success at Top Employers Institute, to explore how Discovery uses personalization, data-centricity, and leadership storytelling to unlock a meaningful wellbeing strategy.

Read ahead to get a snapshot at some of the highlights from Zonke, Jabulile, and Ammara’s engaging discussion, and fill in the form (on the right-hand side of the page) to get the recording of the webinar to watch whenever you have a moment.

Discovery’s wellness is derived from its purpose – which is to make people healthier and enhance and protect their lives. And that’s where insights are drawn from.

Although Discovery has a plethora of wellness resources (including bank rewards, an integrated rewards platform, webinars, corporate wellness), they were still challenged with what is missing around how they support their employee’s mental wellbeing.

Concerns were grouped into four key themes:

Languishing – Adam Grant refers to languishing as the “neglected middle child of mental health.” It is the void between depression and flourishing, in other words, the feeling of being “stuck.”
Grief – Not just the grief of the loss of loved ones, but also the grief of losing the last few years of being home and the grief of experiences. The loss of opportunities and experiences and social interactions.
Burnout – The feeling of being overwhelmed and your body telling you, “I can’t do this anymore.”
Anxiety – A sense of anxiety among employees given the uncertainty and stress in the environment.

Prioritizing employee mental well-being through a series of experiments

As a result of the four key themes identified, Discovery ran a series of experiments to see what was working and what was not working. Some of the experiments conducted were:

A five-part mental well-being series covering several topics (including the importance, stigma, burnout, screen fatigue, and even wellbeing for kids!)
Team initiatives – Power Hours, Meeting Free Afternoons, Brown bag sessions, Resilience toolkits, and bereavement and will support.
Measuring success – dipstick surveys, employee engagement surveys, clarity in accountability, fully leverage data science, and then ideate based on data.

Employees and managers were also already equipped with resilience tools, mental health platforms along with leadership buy-in.

But how does this translate to the employee experience?

Discovery ensured to equip all employees with the necessary tools and programs, irrespective of where they are in their own well-being journey.

Zonke explains that Discovery has an active approach to wellbeing: “Prevention is seen as the yardstick for success -, we really don’t wait for things to completely fall apart, but we journey with the employee in understanding where potential issues may arise, and proactively we seek to manage those.”

To ensure the active approach is delivered, employees have access to something called “Healthy Company.”

Healthy company – a holistic wellbeing approach

A healthy company is Discovery’s program with an aspirational outlook on all four pillars of wellbeing (mental, physical, financial, and emotional). It is focused on a comprehensive understanding of employee wellbeing. It is both diagnostic and proactive, which sets it apart from other tools in the industry.

How does a healthy company work?

Everyone that interacts with a healthy company undergoes screening. This may include, for example, biometric data of employees that may be collected at a wellness expo or a wellness day. This gives an in-depth understanding of an employee’s well-being and picks up any risk factors. Immediately if any risk is picked up, there is an intervention.

The use of Coaching

A coach navigates an employee through their entire well-being journey. The assessment is based on an algorithm – which then, with consent, a healthy company coach reaches out to guide the employee through whichever issue they may be affected with.

The use of data

The consolidation of the assessment results gives Discovery powerful data points for them to design proactive interventions, so interventions do not reside in a vacuum. Interventions are tailored on the back of the new one’s understanding of the complete complexion of the workforce that you are dealing with. Results can be aggregated across the organization and filtered down.

The remarkable thing is that the program is not only open to Discovery employees, but it is open to the market.

It is also enabled with an app with your own personalized health dashboard – you will have a massive repository of educational content across all the four dimensions of wellbeing that you can leverage.

World of Work Trends Report 2023

Top Employers Institute’s World of Work Trends Report 2023 analyses the latest trends in people strategies and practices from leading organisations globally. The report examined data from 2 053 Certified Top Employers to give a broader insight into how global developments will impact workforces in the year ahead.

What’s Inside?

Our latest research shows that the top 3 people priorities for these organisations in 2023 will be to create a high-performance culture, develop new leadership capabilities and align purpose, vision, and values. These three priorities reflect the following three key trends we have identified in our research.

Our contributing researchers and HR auditors explore the changes happening in the world of work, focusing on three major trends that are shaping global people practices:

The Employee Experience will become “super-personalised”.

We will see an unprecedented level of personalisation in the everyday employee experience. The personalisation of consumer needs has been a challenge for organisations and now employees expect to be treated as “internal” customers. The rise of individual employee needs will have much further to run in 2023 – what has been “people centric” will become “person centric”. Only those businesses that can go the extra mile in providing a genuine and heartfelt commitment to their people in this way will generate the emotional reaction necessary to enable a high-performance culture.

Leaders will actively listen for the “heartbeat” in their organisation.

Leaders will develop new strategic skills, particularly that of “listening to the heartbeat” of the organisation. Leaders are effectively having to “double screen” their working world. They need to simultaneously think about long term horizons, while acting decisively in the short term to survive, not to mention to thrive. They, and the next generation of leaders they nurture, will need to place a more committed listening strategy front and centre, to win the emotional commitment of their teams for in preparation for disruptive challenges.

Positive Impact – the new “North Star” for better decisions.

A clear commitment to “positive impact” will be the new North Star for everything that enlightened businesses do in 2023. Positive impact among our Top Employer organisations can be defined and achieved in three ways:

A “lived” purpose that works best when it comes straight from the heart of all employees after all – and remains a constant in their everyday decisions.
The positive impact made by an organisation can only ever be as good as the views that it allows itself to hear. So enlightened attitudes regarding diversity and inclusion are not only important in their own right, but also for the forward momentum they create in all organisations.
Sustainability is key, both in the way an organisation ensures its own continuity through a positive wider impact – and in the way it is perceived and behaves as a good employer.

2023 will be all about these three trends. They will show a powerful human shift towards respecting individuality and valuing difference. It is vital that we attend to these needs because old management models are no longer useful. The best companies listen – truly listen – to their employees, invest in the individual experience, and create a shared purpose that gives meaning to the everyday employee experience. For organisations that achieve this, the future, despite the uncertainty we see all around us, will be very bright.

Case Study: How personalised learning rapidly upskilled the Virtusa workforce

UK Top Employer Virtusa helps clients to grow their businesses, by providing digital transformation, engineering and outsourcing services across a wide range of sectors globally.

To sustain and improve engagement and well-being in the new environment created by the pandemic, Virtusa needed to reskill team members quickly in future technologies. To transform these capabilities was something that employees also wanted, which led to the launch of Engineering IQ (EIQ).

Download the Case Study to:

Learn more about Virtusa’s unique Engineering IQ Programme
Discover how Virtusa has managed, through its EIQ Programme, to link employee well-being directly to a long-term focus on careers
Be inspired by how purposeful and customised learning in a supportive environment rapidly upskilled the Virtusa workforce – and why its clients now want to launch similar programmes of their own

Complete the form to download the Case Study now.

Transforming talent acquisition through the Top Employers Certification Programme

85% of Top Employer organisations agree that the Top Employers Institute Certification creates value for their business, whether it be for their branding, alignment, and benchmarking of HR practices, or connecting with other leaders in HR. When it comes to branding, Top Employers know that the experience of going through a candidate selection process tells a lot more about the organisation than the brand messaging.

At Top Employers Institute, we are always keen to demonstrate the best ways to leverage value from our Certification Programme. Independent and externally verified workforce research, conducted globally among our Top Employers, shows that 85% agree that certification creates value for their business.

It is the branding potential that certification brings with it that is one of the most appreciated benefits. 92% of our Top Employers say they make use of the Certification Seal to attract and/or engage talent.

So how can Top Employers make the most of the opportunity that certification creates in this area?

Recruitment: certification makes a big difference

A great employer brand lies at the heart of any Top Employer’s HR strategy. When it comes to getting the best on board, 70% of those surveyed say they have used the Certification Seal to drive their recruitment process.

Strategic Employer branding can only ever be as good as the impression it makes on potential employees. On this, the results are encouraging. 74% of Top Employers agree that the certification process has improved their positioning as an employer of choice.

It is easy to see the positive impression that certification makes on external candidates. The noticeable benefits, according to our Top Employers, include:

Enhanced awareness among candidates, with references to the Certification Seal made in interviews.
Recognition of the value of certification among partners, such as universities or employment agencies.
More interest in posted roles, with more clicks and applications made through company careers pages.
A decrease in both the time taken to fill roles and an increase in quality of applicants.

One Top Employer sums it up well by telling us that the Certification Seal showed potential candidates clearly that “this company is among the best employers in the world”.

High levels of trust between candidate and potential employer lie at the heart of the value that the Certification Seal brings. As one of our Top Employers told us: “For me … most important is that an external candidate [feels that they] can rely on the certificate.”

Onboarding and Induction: Reinforcing the bond of trust

A top talent acquisition strategy, crucially, requires this trust to continue well beyond the initial recruitment process. After hiring comes the equally important task of onboarding and induction. A recent survey of 1000 full-time employees for People Management magazine revealed that:

43% admitted to having changed their minds on at least one occasion after accepting a job offer.
37% put this down to poor or no follow-up, or other bad experiences after the job offer had been made.

Engagement and Retention: Creating a virtuous circle

The greater branding opportunities for Top Employers from certification through recruitment, onboarding and induction also go on to produce a virtuous circle among existing employees. The independent research conducted for us showed that the use of the Certification Seal helped organisations to:

Actively involve current employees as talent brand ambassadors for external candidates
Increase the engagement of existing employees made aware of the achievement of certification.
Decrease turnover, with employees feeling safe and reassured to work for a certified Top Employer.

Talent acquisition: make it easier with Top Employers institute Certification

Top Employers Institute has guidelines and support for certified best in class employers who want to leverage their talent acquisition strategy further. This includes everything from how to promote the Certification Seal as effectively as possible on the web site, email signatures or social media, through to how best to display them in job ads. Get in touch today for free and become an employer of choice.

Key takeaways | Why diversity is not enough: the importance of inclusion

The Top Employers 2021 Certificate Celebration held on 28 January 2021 brought together HR industry experts from around the world to celebrate the work done in HR and knowledge share the best people practices.

One of the breakout sessions called “Why diversity is not enough: the importance of inclusion”, focused on how to create a sense of belonging in the workplace.

The session was hosted by Jonas Van Wees, HR Auditor at Top Employers Institute, with guest speakers Mechell Chetty (Unilever SA), Anne-Sophie Chauveau-Galas (Alstom) and Raj Verma (Sanofi). The session highlights the importance of inclusion in the workplace and emphasised it as a competitive advantage for employers. Organisations that prioritise diversity and inclusion in their teams far outperform competitors. Furthermore, an inclusive workplace also drives higher levels of productivity and retention, and positively affects employee engagement.

Watch the full session by filling in the form or read the key takeaways here:

Takeaway # 1: Leaders need to create psychological safety

During the session, Mechell Chetty (Uniliver SA) aptly noted that inclusion is about providing employees with a sense of comfort. An organisation’s priority is to harnesses each employee’s uniqueness and potential by creating psychological safety. This is an environment where employees can truly express themselves, innovate, take risks, and be part of solutions that are born from employees unique characteristics.

To create a psychologically safe environment, leaders have to shift away from blaming ‘unconscious bias’ but instead work towards being consciously competent. Thus, the conversation must shift to how leaders can create competence, whether it is on matters of gender, disabilities, or race.

Takeaway #2: Diversity and inclusion is a vital part of employee experience

To create an inclusive culture is to create great employee experiences that people will relate to and remember. As an example of this, Raj Verma holds the title of Chief Diversity and Experience Officer at Sanofi – a clear indication of how important the two fields are related to each other. Employee experience starts at the pre-hire stage, up until the point of resignation or retirement. Inclusion involves creating a great employee experience at all these vital touchpoints in an employee’s lifecycle.

Verma explained diversity and inclusion with a simple process, where the input is a great employee experience, and the output is to maintain and grow diverse talent at every level. Inclusion and creating a sense of belonging is what brings the two points together.

Takeaway #3: Raise awareness of inclusion in the workplace

One of the most important aspects of inclusion is creating purposeful communication and awareness in the workplace. As an example of this, Anne-Sophie Chauveau-Galas shared some initiatives that Alstom created. To raise awareness of inclusiveness in the workplace, Alstom collects all the best practices from their teams around the world. An award is given to the best initiative, which creates positive momentum and spreads the best diversity and inclusion practices across the organisation. Another example is that Alstom created an ‘All-abilities toolkit’, which is a series of tips to help people with different workplace abilities.