Fostering Wellbeing in Hybrid Work

Humans at Work with Michael Glazer

In a world of hybrid work, it's essential for businesses to humanize their approach and to trust employees to manage their own work well. With disparate team members working across various locations, it's challenging for people to stay motivated and connected. How can we address this?

Oliver Henry is a Co-founder of WorkLifeWell and the Global Head of Health and Wellbeing at easyJet. He has spent the last decade helping multi-national organizations and globally recognized brands design and implement wellbeing and people strategies to create and nurture healthy, happy and productive workplace cultures.

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Episode Highlights

1:13 How hybrid work is affecting the way teams interact.

3:36 The link between how we communicate and wellbeing

5:49 How to ensure that communication with a new hires goes well

10:56 Norms for communication in a hybrid environment

12:46 Keeping people connected and motivated when they work remotely

16:01 Shared responsibilities for overcoming hybrid work challenges

18:10 Key ingredients for making wellbeing strategies successful

23:07 Differences between wellbeing wants and needs

28:46 Signals that wellbeing policies are addressing employee needs

32:35 Considerations for getting hybrid work policies right

34:53 3S approach to recognize and respond to diverse wellbeing needs

Oliver's view on the greatest unmet wellbeing need at work today

"A complete lack of understanding of what people need. There is just no active listening from businesses to colleagues around what is it that actually makes you feel happy and healthy at work.

And now that we know that, we can create a strategy around insight versus assumption. And businesses that get very excited around that word 'health and well-being' or 'diversity and inclusion' or 'sustainability,' and they just jump into the doing, they jump into the activity into wasting time and resource on things that fail to engage and have any impact, versus just pausing, reflecting, and taking time to just understand what people want and what people need and get real clarity around those points.

So, the greatest unmet well-being need is just my business doesn't understand me. They don't really, they're not listening. They can't hear what we're saying. Sometimes they're asking the questions, then they're doing these pulse checks and these engagement surveys, but they're not acting on the back of it. They're asking, but they're not doing. So it's as if I were to sit down with board members or senior leaders and say, 'Tell me what you think the health and wellbeing landscape is like,' you know that this was actually a Deloitte study that came out earlier this year. The opinion of health and well-being that the C-suite have of the business versus the businesses' opinion, are polar opposites. Because it's like they're living in two different worlds. So to me that that is the biggest unmet need is just clarity around culture and people."

What “working with humans” means to Oliver

“It's an interesting one, where if we were to flip that to 'humans at work'', or humans working, so humans is the first word, and recognizing that there is simplicity in the complexities of humans. It's a constantly evolving area of focus.

And when we bring in different people, you know, we talk about diversity and inclusion or inclusion and diversity if we take the diversity lens. People have tried to define that, but every single person on this planet is diverse, in fact, right? We all have a different footprint or fingerprint, and brain and psychology, and physiology.

Then, working with humans means we're constantly evolving our approach based on the humans that we are working with. And we're constantly conscious of who it is within our organization that ultimately is here to help us succeed. So how can we help them succeed and feel like they are part of our culture and part of our community, so that we have a thriving business.

And that to me is 'working with humans'.”

Resources

Follow: Oliver on LinkedIn

Visit: WorkLifeWell