19.1.1 Stage 1: Identify well-being stakeholders

Starting with well-being stakeholders helps to ensure that there is a clear focus on the needs of staff groups who will be affected by, and can affect, the levels of well-being in the organization. It usually helps to include at least one group of senior managers or leaders.

19.1.2 Stage 2: Understand your starting point

Once the stakeholders are identified, it’s important to focus on current organizational activity around well-being. At this point, it’s useful to list all current well-being initiatives and note the benefits that each delivers to the stakeholders that have already been identified. Using the matrix shown in Table 19.1 can help to do this and may reveal that either some stakeholders currently receive no benefits or that some initiatives do not deliver any benefits to stakeholder groups.

It is also important to consider the organizational context at this stage. This includes considering the business-level outcomes that are important to the organization when it comes to improving well-being and employee engagement (e.g. sickness-absence rates, turnover, patient satisfaction etc.). Which outcomes would get key stakeholders’ attention in terms of buying into the well-being improvement effort? What indicators are likely to be most effective to measure progress in relation to achieving these outcomes? This is also the right time to consider strategic drivers that are relevant to well-being initiatives. How do the business-level outcomes that you want to influence link to the organization’s mission/strategy/business objectives?

19.1.3 Stage 3: Creating and evaluating your well-being initiative wish list

Creating a wish list is all about considering what else is required in terms of well-being initiatives. It’s where you examine the matrix and identify the gaps – for example, are there outcomes that are not influenced by any of the existing initiatives?

It’s also an opportunity to feed in the thinking that has been done about current strategic drivers: what additional initiatives are suggested by them? How can they support existing well-being initiatives? It’s also a good time to think about well-being initiatives that have been considered desirable for a while, but have not yet been implemented: how can they fill the gaps in the matrix?

The aim is to end up with a wish list that combines new and existing initiatives. Review this list in the light of the target outcomes identified earlier in the process and evaluate the extent to which the initiatives deliver benefits to key stakeholder groups.

When you have a final list it’s important to evaluate it thoroughly to take into account the current organizational context. This includes thinking about dependencies in terms of whether the success of a particular initiative is dependent on something else that is happening, for example, a funding decision or critical timescales. Also, consider the people/groups who are likely to affect the success of intended interventions. Are there key groups or individuals who can play a significant influencing role in ensuring the success of an initiative – or who could possibly completely ‘derail’ it? It is essential to identify these people/groups at this point and make plans to involve them in your efforts.

19.1.4 Stage 4: Determine the value of improving well-being to the organization

The final stage of building the business case for investing in well-being and employee engagement involves generating a clear picture of how the costs and benefits balance out. This enables the organization to take a robust view on the extent to which it is ‘worth’ gearing up to make the investment.

The benefits The first aspect of this stage concerns the benefits. Where possible it’s always useful to generate cash-based figures to express the value that improving well-being will deliver to the organization. It is possible to do this using research-based information about the improvements that are possible and combining them with industry standard figures (e.g. Robertson, 2007). It is also important to try to envisage how things will be qualitatively different and improved when working life in your organization is characterized by high levels of well-being, e.g. better leadership, a stronger sense of purpose for all staff, a more supportive and healthy environment. It is often harder to generate cash figures for such outcomes, but these are not required or possible for every aspect of improvement.

The costs The second part of this stage involves identifying and quantifying the costs of the investment to the organization. Clearly, it’s almost impossible to significantly change quality of working life, leadership/management style and fundamental aspects of the prevailing corporate culture without investing in it. There are usually external costs involved in this type of work, as organizations rarely have all of the expertise they need to make a real difference internally. It is therefore important to revisit your final list of initiatives and make an estimate of the external costs required to implement them. Finally, don’t forget to take the internal resources required to successfully implement the initiatives into account and wherever possible quantify them. External consultants can play a valuable role in helping to design and implement integrated approaches to well-being, but these projects are seldom successful unless the organization in question is fully involved and committed. A good place to start is revisiting the key stakeholder groups that you identified and estimating the time required from each. After that, consider who else will need to be involved – e.g. the internal communications department.

19.3.1 Senior Management Ownership – Take Responsibility but Share Power

Another frequent barrier to success is to see the well-being improvement action plan as being owned by HR, health and safety or occupational health. It is not unusual for senior managers to delegate action planning and ownership of the plan to one of, or a combination of, these specialist functions. At best this approach is misguided, and at worst it is an abdication of a key leadership role. Leaders are responsible for creating and developing organizational culture – as the management thinker Max De Pree put it they ‘define reality’ for the workforce. In this sense, well-being and the interventions that are required to maintain and improve it are matters of strategic relevance and importance.

There is a difficult balance for leaders to strike here between having a vision that encourages employees to be highly engaged and giving away enough control to enable that to happen. In this sense, traditional command and control style leadership and management is usually the enemy of employee engagement. In organizations characterized by this style of leadership employees are ‘sold to’ as if they were an external customer. In such organizations, relentless internal marketing about the next change or type of behaviour required tends to switch employees off. This is in marked contrast to more modern conceptions of leadership as an exercise in ‘co-creation’ and ‘involvement’ that aims to proactively create situations where employees are part of the solution design process – and not just in the sense of completing a staff survey. The message to staff inherent in such approaches to leadership is simple: ‘You’re involved and our job as leaders is to provide the right conditions for you to contribute your best work’ (Smythe, 2007). Clearly, many UK organizations have a long way to go to get to this situation, but the drive to get there can only come from those at the top. Once the conditions are created employees also have to accept their responsibility for behaving as productive partners in the process.

In his excellent book, Chief Engagement Officer, John Smythe provides some powerful insights into the role that leaders need to play if well-being and engagement are to thrive in organizations. He makes the point that ‘engagement’ can be defined narrowly – it’s simply an integral part of organizational and local decision making. So, what becomes key is the leader’s capacity to engage with staff in ways that add value to everyday decision making and change. But what is also critical to adding value is the way that the organization’s design opens up large-scale change to the right groups. The idea is that if the right groups are engaged they will add value to day-to day decisions and larger processes of change – but, of course, senior leaders have to learn to give some of the control away to get this reward and that can require a major mindset change for some. The author also notes that positive engagement practices such as those described above and in the case study below could pre-empt reliance on more bureaucratic consultation processes imposed by regulation and tradition. For example, you only have to look at the rise of social networking and sharing websites to see that what once was thought of as ‘chaos’ or ‘anarchy’ is now an accepted part of ‘how we do things’. Imagine a world without YouTube, MySpace or FaceBook! These revolutionary concepts were all based on a positive ethos of sharing for the good of the community – whether that be programmers, musicians, film-makers or society at large. Organizations are no different – they are just communities of people who are gathered together for a common purpose – and as with the online communities mentioned above, ways of communicating, sharing and generating knowledge have changed forever. This has profound implications for the way that businesses are organized, led and managed. To reset the bar, John Smythe introduces a good ground rule for all leaders to adhere to:

Decisions are not complete until leaders have planned the engagement of their people.

Another point that the book from which the above case study makes is that the style of leaders will either turn people on or off – both one-to-one and en masse. The idea that leaders and managers have a major role to play in defining the experience of employees is not a new one, but there is now a much better understanding of the leadership behaviours that influence well-being levels across the workforce. With this understanding comes a greater willingness to invest in ensuring that these behaviours are part of the prevailing corporate culture. Figure 19.3 shows the areas where leadership style through well-being enablers has a direct impact on staff well-being and stress perceptions (using the HSE Management Standards structure).

So leaders and leadership behaviour is important, but equally pivotal is the role of line managers and the relationships they develop and maintain with their direct reports. There are two main reasons for the importance of the line manager role:

1. They play a central role in building and sustaining an engaged and enthusiastic workforce.
2. Management processes, intended to ensure that employees’ behaviour is aligned with the goals of the organization, are limited by the reactions that they produce from the workforce.

The second point reinforces the central issue in this report – that organisations need an engaged and positive approach from their people, otherwise change and other interventions, whatever they are intended to achieve, will not produce a positive reaction from the workforce and will therefore be less effective. Line manager behaviour is critical for enhancing and sustaining high levels of psychological well-being in any organization. This relationship is the most important one for all employees. The line manager is the link between the goals and mission of the organization and the day-to-day behaviour of the employee. As far as psychological well-being is concerned, the key to the success of this relationship is the extent to which the manager strikes the balance between challenge and support for the employee. Feeling suitably challenged and being able to strive to reach goals is a critical factor in building psychological well-being and self-confidence, both within the workplace and elsewhere. However, when challenge levels are too great or the goals are really unachievable people need support. Balancing these two types of behaviour is perhaps the most important managerial skill for developing a high well-being, high resilience workforce.

This highlights what is often a central development need for managers that needs to be addressed, increasing their capacity and skills to balance challenge and support effectively. This is often best achieved through one-to-one coaching, but at the very least should be the subject of training. The impetus for this may be to enable managers to be more supportive to improve collaboration, as indicated in Table 19.2. Alternatively, it may stem from a need to up-skill middle managers in challenging more effectively upwards and at their peer level, as well as with their direct reports.

At Robertson Cooper we have developed the Leadership Impact approach that seeks to help managers to fully understand the impact of their leadership behaviour on the well-being and engagement of their staff. The well-being enablers in Figure 19.3 can and should be influenced by leaders. To do so effectively they need to understand their own behavioural preferences in these critical areas – and these are linked to their personality or natural style. For example, some managers will find it difficult to delegate due to a strong perfectionist streak and as a result their staff may feel they are given limited opportunity to exert influence over areas of work they feel should be within their span of control. Or, a senior manager’s desire for change and achievement may cause him or her to push people too hard on occasion. The key point is that self-awareness in critical areas is the starting point for developmental change. On its own it does not guarantee development, but it is an essential precursor.

19.3.2 Influencing Senior Managers

Probably the ultimate barrier to success in improving well-being and engagement are the attitudes and beliefs that some senior managers and directors appear to hold about these areas. There is still a tendency for some senior leaders to see them as soft issues that HR should tackle to allow them to concentrate on the performance of the business. Ultimately, well-being and engagement will take root in an organization only when the people leading it truly believe these are strategic and performance issues. The business case approach we have described earlier in this report is part of making this connection, but another important ingredient is making a personal connection with senior people, focusing on their well-being. It’s important to win their buy-in and develop open and strong relationships with the key stakeholders at the top of the organization. For example, a major global pharmaceutical company had a coach spend a year talking to all of its senior executives one to one about their well-being and work–life balance. This was originally intended as a one-off initiative, but created such a demand from the senior executives that it became a permanent role for the coach! Crucially the company also sees this as part of a climate change process which has led to a strong belief that good health and well-being is good business, and has opened the door for an ongoing programme of activity throughout the organization. When you get it right at the top level it’s possible to make big changes to how things are done in the organization.

1. Cropanzano, R. & Wright, T.A. (1999). A 5-year study of change in the relationship between well-being and performance. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 51, 252–65.
2. Donald, I., Taylor, P., Johnson, S., Cooper, C., Cartwright, S. & Robertson, S. (2005). Work environments, stress and productivity: an examination using ASSET. International Journal of Stress Management, 12, 409–23.
3. HSE (2005). The Management Standards for Work-related Stress. http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/standards.htm.
4. Robertson, S. (2007). Using business psychology to close the well-being gap. Selection and Development Review, 23(4).
5. Smythe, J. (2007). The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer: Turning Hierarchy Upside Down to Drive Performance. London: Gower.