I was pleased to be invited to the BCO & LCMB workshop. Where we discussed the Business Case for Productive, High Performing and Healthier Workplaces. It ended up being a really interesting session with participants from a wide variety of industries.
The day started with a series of presentations covering the latest research in the space.
Professor Derek Clements-Croome talked around the Flourish model, where we need to go beyond just comfort to improve people’s experience in the workplace. With medical absence and presenteeism costing in excess of £100bn a year, a holistic approach is an investment and not a luxury.
John O’Brien from LCMB talked through key findings from the WLP+ project which was enabled by Spica’s GemEx platform. Research proved that the environmental impact on productivity in real-world offices, showed significantly improved quality at lower CO2 levels.
John also highlighted a Harvard Business Review study showing that every dollar spent on wellness, saved $2.73 in reduced absenteeism and $3.27 in medical expenses. Maybe they should really say invested and not spent.
Ed Suttie of BRE then talked through a study currently running looking at the impact biophilia can bring to the workspace, which promises to bring some interesting findings. Did you know that, for those in an open plan office, there is a 66% drop in performance when exposed to distracting levels of noise?
Following presentations, we discussed some common challenges in the space and our experiences in addressing them.
Interesting Points Raised:
- Knowledge and support for Health & Wellbeing policies varies a lot between regions and industries but is growing year on year.
- There is a lack of ownership for the employee wellbeing strategy. It ends up partly tacked on to existing responsibilities, if at all.
- A change in culture is often needed to realise the benefits of new Health & Wellbeing policies and encourage engagement. This should be supported from the top down.
- Improvement benefits are spread across the business. So whilst it must be a collaborative approach to impact change, each department needs to recognise the wider value created.
- ROI is always going to be a challenge to measure because Productivity improvements aren’t part of a closed system. There are many variables affected by outside influences and base measures often vary by business area.
- We need to measure the current situation and empower employees to understand the changes to get their buy-in.
- Widespread change could be driven by knowledgeable employees, empowered by personal data, as well as a Government Tsar, highlighting and emphasising the benefits.
Final Thoughts
My observations from the discussions are that there seems to be a grey area between encouraging employees to participate in wellbeing schemes and enforcing change on them. We need to find the right balance. It’s important to recognise both an employee’s personal choice and the pressure to comply due to company culture.
In design we talk about how ‘we are not the user’, in the same way the business is not the employee. The session today was well attended by people who’ve seen the evidence and really support Health and Wellbeing changes. They’ve also frequently participated in such schemes which they then personally benefited from. However, this is not a one-size-fits-all situation, wouldn’t it be boring if it was? We need to support and listen to different perspectives when implementing change. That’s a good thing, in the end our diversity drives our creativity.
I look forward to seeing the discussion in the area grow and develop further. If you’d like to talk to Spica about how we could support you in using technology to support your healthy, productive and high performing workspace then get in touch.
