Is employee well-being a management responsibility? Should it be?
Those were a couple of the core questions that stimulated considerable discussion at a seminar I attended earlier this week. They certainly gave me reason to stop and think more deeply about an issue that I had never previously given any conscious thought to. I have always taken the idea that a manager is responsible for the well-being of his people completely for granted. After all it simply seems to be a given – epitomised by the fact that even in the army the officers only eat after their men. How can you expect to meet your objectives if your people are not in a state to properly play their part?
As ever, it comes down to definitions and what is meant by well-being. The definition here seemed to cover the whole gamut of the individual’s physical, psychological and emotional health. This inevitably stimulated discussion whether it was presumptuous – and possibly even paternalistic – to expect managers to get so involved in what are essentially personal issues and the prerogative of the individual alone. Many saw this as crossing a boundary of personal rights, while others saw it as a justified intervention in matters of mutual interest.
At the end of the day, however, I found that my position remained largely unchanged. As I see it the individual is responsible for themselves and a manager’s responsibility is simply to ensure that they are equipped to meet their commitments to the best of their ability. Too much of the discussion is rooted in the idea of employees as a resource and therefore something that needs to be managed, rather than as people. When you see them as people you show an interest in them and get to know more about them. You recognise and understand that as people they have different roles to play in life; they may well be any or all of partners or spouses, parents, children, community players as well as employees.
These different roles create tension and sometimes even conflicting demands. Ultimately, it is the individual who has to resolve this conflict and decide at any moment where their priority lies. As a manager you cannot really make that decision for them – certainly not on an ongoing basis. If, however, you have taken the time to get to know them as people; to know and understand something of their lives and the different roles they are playing, you will have built a trusting relationship in which there is greater scope for flexibility and appropriate give and take. You will have enabled a situation where communication is likely to be more open and honest and where intervention is not seen as meddling but as the inevitable sharing of thoughts.
My definition of well-being is “a state of feeling good about yourself.” Naturally you cannot be engaged if you don’t feel good about yourself to begin with. Thus well-being is certainly a pre-requisite for employee engagement. If you now link feeling good about yourself to the three elements mentioned previously – your physical, emotional and psychological health – this means that you have to be balanced and feeling fulfilled.
Being balanced means you are comfortable in your different roles and the way you juggle them. Fulfilment, however, comes from a sense that you are achieving your potential; something that comes from addressing those three intrinsic motivators – autonomy, mastery and purpose. So, not only do you want this yourself, but, as a manager, it is something you want to create for your people. And the best way to do this is through employee ownership.
Employee ownership links the life-investment your people are making in your organisation with a sense of shared purpose and serves as a catalyst to create the autonomy, mastery and purpose that will deliver the well-being and emotional equity to secure employee engagement and sustain better performance and better results.
Best of all, it will do so without any special well-being programmes or employee engagement initiatives. All these massive benefits begin by simply recognising that employees are people and not resources and treating them as such!