Off the back of our blog series on workplace health and wellbeing by our Managing Director, Ben Moss, we asked our Founding Director and CIPD President, Professor Sir Cary Cooper for his 5 top tips for businesses thinking about creating their workplace wellbeing strategy. This is what he told us… 

Tip 1: Be clear on the purpose

Know why your business values wellbeing and what you hope to achieve by investing in it - both for your employees and for the organisation as a whole. 

Tip 2: Remember wellbeing is cultural

You won’t harness what wellbeing can offer if you don’t embed it in your broader culture. That means you have to think beyond commissioning line manager and mental health first aid training. As my colleague Ben Moss wrote in Part 3 of his blog post on the subject…it all has to add up to something: a vision, with real outcomes. 

Tip 3: Be realistic

In my experience, most organisations now ‘get’ the business case for wellbeing and that can lead them towards over-ambitious aims in terms of what it can achieve for them. Better to plan carefully and exceed expectations - a strategy is about creating the future, it’s necessarily long-term. 

Tip 4: If you need a strategy write a strategy, not a plan

There’s a fundamental difference between a strategy and a plan. Understand what that is and take action in line with what your business and its employees most need. 

Tip 5: Take good advice

Whole business wellbeing is a relatively new discipline, so it’s unlikely you’ve done this before. But there are people out there who have, stepping back and talking to the right people at the outset will save you a lot of time, money and effort in the long-run.

Building a workplace health and wellbeing strategy doesn’t have to be painful – with our clients and Founding Director, Sir Cary Cooper, we’ve developed a streamlined process that can bring together what you have with what you need to create a simple, clear and powerful outline strategy.

For more info go to 'Develop an effective health and wellbeing strategy.'

For a conversation with a wellbeing expert call 0161 232 4910 or for more details email hi@robertsoncooper.com

With US election results and ongoing Brexit rulings, this week has been a timely reminder that we are navigating through uncertain political and economic times. The landscape in which we now work and live is vastly different from even 5 years ago. Good Day At Work Professor Cary Cooper reflects on how a cultural revolution can help people thrive in future workplaces.

We are in a period of societal change, and our workplaces need to know the role they play in making work lives, and our lives as a whole, better. I believe it’s up to both organisations and employees to create more good days at work, by taking and owning shared responsibility in wellbeing.

Currently the world of workplace wellbeing and HR are focussing on flexible working, with recent studies showing that it can actually boost productivity. In the UK every worker has had the right to request flexible working since a new law was introduced in 2014. This law is a very positive step in the right direction.

By embracing flexible working, the UK government is taking a stance for work-life integration. Differing from work-life balance which can see many of us torn between competing priorities; work-life integration is about integrating work and home life so they can live in harmony.

Work-life integration means everyone has the right to choose the best way for them to marry work and life in terms of when, where and how they work. This often involves flexible working.

But making new laws does not change a culture. We all know that. Culture is deep-seeded and ingrained.

Men—not always seen as the ‘losers of cultural oppression’, however when it comes to work-life integration they are not winning. Men are facing more hurdles than women when it comes to adopting flexible working.

So leaders, managers, partners, let’s change this. We need to foster a culture where men feel as if they can work flexibly and embrace work-life integration without feeling as if their careers will be adversely affected.

Yes, not everybody wants to work flexibly but the key here is that they have the choice. It’s time to open the conversation to enable choice.

Many organisations believe, and in fact many men themselves foster the same belief that, if men choose to work flexibly they are not taking their careers seriously. The current culture in many organisations and, more broadly in society, terribly hinders flexible working and the potential benefits we could all reap from it.

If you can get your work done in a timely and effective fashion, meeting your set goals and KPIs, what does it matter where or when you complete the work? Workplace leaders need to recognise this. More than recognise this, leaders need to facilitate, embrace and practice this themselves.

Leaders, managers, colleagues surely it’s about time we move away from rewarding facetime and move instead towards, measuring a ‘dedicated worker’ based on their performance and outputs.

Men can be particularly bound to this old way of measuring success and still think they are the ‘bread-winner’ or the ‘hunter’ and need to spend all their time at work, working hard.

As we know more women than ever are working. While women tend to have more access to flexible working, they too see negative impacts—they are often overlooked for promotions for doing so.

In the study that my team at Robertson Cooper did with Bank Workers Charity, Making Flexible Working Work: Moving from Work-Life Balance to Integration, we looked in detail at the gender disparity around adopting flexible working and also the implications on both sides. We found that only 28 per cent of senior executives are female, this is despite the fact that more women are in the workforce than ever before.

This statistic is grossly underwhelming. Can this really still be the case in 2016? Women, like men, are too suffering the impacts of the current culture—where facetime and long desk hours are rewarded. People who are not necessarily working harder, but rather longer are getting the promotion. Women, it seems, are missing out.

Changes need to happen across the board so that men have equal access to flexible working and so that neither women nor men are penalised professionally for embracing work-life integration. 

It is more ‘acceptable’ amongst employees with carer responsibilities, who are usually women, to take up flexible working as there is an obvious and easily explained need for them to. Although as I discussed, this is not without its negative impacts.

We are seeing more and more men taking up childcare responsibilities and rejecting the impractical and false notion that childcare is only a job for women. Saying this though, it is important to reiterate that work-life integration be opened up beyond carers. Everybody should feel like they have a right to request flexible working.

Why should single people, or people who choose not to have children not be ‘allowed’ to practice work-life integration? This simply isn’t fair and can foster ‘burn-out’, where people dedicate years of their life solely focussing on their career and eventually realise that this is not sustainable—hence burn-out.

Work-life Integration is about working smarter to reduce stress, unhappiness and consequences like burn-out, and creating more good days at work.

Men, women, all of us should be able to have conversations with our managers, and managers with their staff, around embracing work-life integration through flexible working without the fear of repercussion.

Work-life integration has the potential to really impact peoples’ lives in a positive way. We can feel more accomplished at work and home. It can help reduce the feeling of ‘missing out’ or ‘losing out’ in one of our domains.

Leaders and managers, it is time we look to work-life integration to foster better working environments to positively impact wellbeing at work, and in turn in life.

If you’d like to read more on work-life integration practices such as flexible working you can download the report, Making Flexible Working Work: Moving from Work-Life Balance to Integration.

Does your workplace embrace work-life integration through practices like flexible working? And importantly do you participate? If you do, what benefits are you seeing, or perhaps what negative impacts are you seeing?

Continue the conversation, comment below or tweet @ProfCaryCooper.

The UK has a productivity problem. Currently ranking 21% lower than the average for the other six members in the G7, despite a fast-growing economy, the UK government is scrambling to find a solution to help plug the gap. The focus seems to be on new technologies as a way of improving productivity, but this strategy isn’t working.

The problem is that, thanks to the downsizing that took place during the recession, there has been an increase in pressure on people working in both the public and private sectors. Those employees who survived the cuts were left feeling less secure in their jobs and having to pick up the slack.

Data from Robertson Cooper’s ASSET™ survey shows that, as the recession went on, people grew more and more concerned that they were working longer hours than they would choose to. Of course, this had an adverse effect on people’s family lives and on their overall wellbeing.

The question that we need to be asking is: how do we manage this situation? How do we manage the fact that employees are disengaging because they’re working longer and harder, feeling more job-insecure and feel they’re getting less in return?

The psychological contract is broken

What really happened during the recession was the break-down of the psychological contract between employers and their employees. A tacit agreement between companies and their staff, the psychological contract at work is the mutual understanding that both the employee and employer both have certain obligations and responsibilities.

But during the recession, the power shifted. For some, rapidly declining job security meant that they suddenly had to sacrifice more of their time and energy to demonstrate commitment for their jobs. For others, the cut-backs meant they could no longer deliver the same quality they were accustomed to and, rather than producing work to a lower standard, they put more pressure on themselves by refusing to compromise. In return, employers came to see this as a normal way of working.

We are demanding more and more from our employees without giving people the security or flexibility they need to feel happy and healthy at work. It’s not a sustainable way of working. It’s becoming clear that we need a different kind of arrangement. We need good line managers at all levels of our organisations who are equipped to handle this situation.

Managing attitudes

The changes our workplaces have been undergoing since 2008 have left people feeling drained. When we’re under pressure we find it almost impossible to be creative and productive. We are also significantly less open to new ways of working, meaning we’re not able to deal with increased demands in a positive and proactive way. Instead, people respond by working longer and harder, which is making them ill.

Of course, sickness absence figures have more or less stabilised. It’s at a reasonably high level, but it is stable. But, crucially, presenteeism is at an all-time high. People feel they have to come into work even when they’re not well, and this is costing employers twice as much!

It used to be that the main causes of sickness absence were musculoskeletal – back pain and that sort of thing. But today, the main causes are stress, depression and anxiety because people aren’t able to cope with their employers’ expectations. It is becoming clear that we need to change our attitudes and abolish the assumption that working more hours at full-capacity is the answer because it is simply not a healthy, productive or sustainable way of working.

In order for employees to be able to work more efficiently and productively, they have to be well enough to do so. This means they can’t be suffering from stress, anxiety, depression and all the rest of it.

It all comes down to the way people are managed.

In the future, we need people who can manage people

Sadly, many organisations don’t hire managers based on their people skills. But why not?

When we’re recruiting the managers of the future, we need to take their social, interpersonal skills into account and consider how capable they are of managing and building relationships with other human beings.

We need leaders with the ability to speak to employees in a language that they can relate to and appreciate. We need more engaged leaders who manage by praise and reward, not by fault-finding. We need leaders who can build trust to cultivate a culture of flexibility, giving their teams more control over their workloads which will make them feel more engaged as a result.

Currently, we don’t have enough of these people in managerial roles in our organisations. The psychological contract is gone and we’re increasingly moving closer and closer towards the American model of working. Until we start investing in the right skills for our managers, we won’t see any dramatic improvements in the UK’s productivity.

Over the past six years, barely a week has gone by where bankers aren’t being criticised in the media spotlight. Yes, we do need to report issues of rigging, fines and misdemeanours but, as with most cases of rehabilitation, culture change in banking is also heavily reliant on our support.

Regulation will help to curb excessive risk-taking, as Mark Carney has frequently implored, but as many senior financial figures have stated the weight of regulation can also stifle the progress of reform. Hefty fines do serve a purpose in the short term, but sustainable and successful industries are based on a system of self-regulation that takes time to develop. If ethical behaviour is the end-goal then right now banking is in the foothills of cultural reform, by its own admission.

Even the large institutions are starting to realise that “cultural complacency” – as Martin Wheatley, chief executive of the FCA, referred to it – will inevitably drive long-standing customers into the arms of competitors who openly provide a more ethical service. It is the responsibility of policy-makers to ensure an environment that does not incentivise bad behaviour. It’s the responsibility of banks to align themselves with consumer attitudes and the demands of their market.

We’ve seen the throng of challenger banks rise over the past five years, which means there are now more places to deposit your money than ever before. Their progress is impressive when you look at the figures: the challengers’ share of gross mortgage lending rose from 17.5% in 2011 to 28.8% in 2013, according to Investec…and that share is still rising.

So, how do banks begin to create their own cultural framework to live by? TSB are a good example, having adopted a reward strategy that gives every member of staff £100 worth of company shares. As with John Lewis, one aim is to promote high sustainable performance within the business that employees themselves can benefit from. More than that, it’s a symbolic gesture that embeds a level of trust between employer and employee that’s deeper than, “Can you hit a sales target?”

Lloyds scrapped quarterly sales targets last year in an effort to restructure their bonus system. Commission at Lloyds is now partly based on customer feedback rather than product sales alone. Elsewhere, Goldman Sachs has opted to improve the experience of their junior bankers by banning them from the office between the hours of 9pm on Friday and 9am on Sunday. It’s a smart move that certainly encourages better working conditions and a more sustainable attitude towards work among the next generation of bankers.

We are seeing pockets of change already but initiatives like these are just the beginning. Banks are now seeking to outdo each other in terms of service to their community, not just competing to offer the most attractive rates on the high-street. Widespread cultural change is the goal, but that will take time and, more importantly, support if it is to impact across all levels of the financial sector.

To find out more about how banks are approaching culture change, click here.