What’s the payback from investing in employee well-being?
“Profit and employee happiness aren’t mutually exclusive. Our research says that one can drive the other,” Jen Wetherow, senior director of Great Place to Work, told Benefits Canada’s Calgary Benefits Summit on May 5.
There’s a strong correlation between trust, healthy working relationships and long-term stock performance, Wetherow noted. Companies with the highest levels of trust between employees and management consistently outrank their peers by a factor of two to three times, according to Great Place to Work, an organization that conducts an annual workplace study surveying 7,200 organizations in 55 countries.
The common thread joining the best workplaces is that, “at the core, it’s about building high-trust relationships,” said Witherow.
Great Place to Work measures relationships in a number of ways. For example, it assesses employee-management relationships in terms of credibility, respect and fairness. Do the leaders walk the talk? Do they have a vision of where they’re going and how to get there? Do they communicate it to their team?
When it comes to the relationship between coworkers, it looks at camaraderie and employees’ view of their work. How much pride do they have in it? Do they have a sense of how their work contributes to the bigger picture?
For example, the Mayo Clinic has done “an exceptional job of helping employees draw a line of sight between their daily tasks and the organization’s higher purpose,” said Wetherow. “From the floor cleaners to the CEO, they are united in the goal of saving lives.”
While even the best workplaces aren’t immune to external factors, “they tend to recover more quickly and with greater strength because they’ve got a larger reservoir of trust than their peers,” said Wetherow.
What’s her main advice for employers looking to improve their employees’ experience? “The low-hanging fruit is helping your employees draw that connection between their daily tasks and the higher purpose of the organization,” she said. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and this allows your employees to take pride in something bigger.”
Read more from Benefits Canada‘s 2016 Calgary Benefits Summit