Worksite Wellness in 2021
Employee Wellbeing: Three Key Areas Facing Most Employers in 2021
The shift in focus by employers and the worksite wellness community from a singular focus on employee health to a focus on employee wellbeing potentially opens the door for employers and worksite wellness practitioners needing to address any one or more of the many different areas or common issues associated with employee wellbeing today. As we begin our journey into 2021, I would suggest that there are three key subjects that employers should focus their time, energy, attention and money (TEAM) on: employee mental health, parenting and caregiving. Parenting and caregiving are both linked to or associated with employee mental health.
Employee Mental Health
I use the term mental health as an umbrella like term, similar to the way the term physical health is used. Used this way, employee mental health consists of three components: mental illness, mental wellness and psychological distress. Unfortunately, in many workplaces today, mental health is only seen as being a way for the employer to address employee mental illness, including substance abuse disorders. This is really unfortunate as less than 20% of employees actually experience a mental illness thereby leaving the majority of employees seeing no benefit from an employer’s focus on mental health. The reality is that all employees experience mental health, with or without experiencing a mental illness.
Parenting
Neither parenting nor caregiving are new areas or challenge to many employers. Recent history relating to parenting can be traced back to the onset of the work-life balance movement in the early 1970’s when women starting demanding more work flexibility to accommodate their family schedules and needs.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has certainly impacted the work from home (WFH) movement. The acknowledgement that a more contagious or infectious strain of COVID-19 is now circulating around the U.S. is likely to further drive the WFH movement as well. Both of these will likely place increasing attention and pressure on parenting and caregiving in the 2021. Therefore, both will likely further impact employee behaviors, productivity and performance going forward.
The work — home spillover effects are only likely to intensify with WFH being one of the more significant outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic to date. As a result, work — life boundary issues will take on increasing significance going forward in 2021, at least in the near-term.
In terms of parenting, there is some very interesting research emerging on the topics of parental fatigue and parental burnout. Employee fatigue and burnout have already been identified as major challenges for employers today.
The preliminary research on parental burnout is suggesting that it consists of the same components as employee burnout. If these preliminary results hold true, parental burnout could have some interesting implications for workplaces and employers going forward, especially for the WFH employees with children.
Caregiving
Physical distancing is one of the standard public health measures for limiting or controlling the spread of a virus. If you are not exposed to a virus, you can’t possibly contract or develop the diseases linked to the virus.
Since the COVID-19 virus is more contagious than other types of coronaviruses maintaining a separation or physical distance makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, for the current COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials chose to use the term social distancing, rather than physical distancing in their pandemic related messaging. Social distancing will not stop the spread of the virus while physical distancing most certainly will.
As a result of social distancing, we are seeing today huge drops in wellbeing status along with significant increases in feeling a lack of connection and feelings of social isolation. These changes place an added burden and additional challenges on employee family caregivers.
Given these three issues, as we begin our journey into 2021, I would suggest that employers and worksite wellness practitioners explore employee needs and wants in each of these three key areas. There is no magical solution or silver bullet when it comes to employee needs and wants in any one of these areas. And certainly what works for one employer won’t necessarily work in a different workplace setting due to differences in employee demographics and/or organization culture. So what is an employer to do?
At the very least, employers should ask employees what they need and want. It would be even better for employers to involve their employees in the benefit and employee focused services conversations.
Since there is no universal law or rule stating that employers must be the only source of solutions, employers should give consideration to starting parenting and caregiving employee resource groups (ERGs) and developing peer support related opportunities within the workplace. It is well established that what employees have a hand in creating, they will better support.
©2021. William McPeck. All Rights Reserved.
