Well-being at work: the watchword for entrepreneurs and collaborators
Results don’t bring satisfaction any more, it’s the opposite!
It is a question of perspective and priority: wellbeing at work is not just the absence of discomfort nor is it a secondary aspect for companies within their management.
Corporate wellbeing – as reported in the in-depth article by Mezzopieno News – represents the ‘set of approaches and good practices that are needed to live well within an organization ; an element that must be built and maintained with the involvement of your collaborators.
Every worker, first of all, is a person who embodies not only professional skills but also temperament, character and personality. All factors are determined by the relationships within your company.
“Work should be a great joy and is still torment for many, torment not to have it, torment to do a job that is not useful, does not serve a noble purpose”
Adriano Olivetti
Taking care of the well-being of your employees is essential for the future and business prosperity . Putting the person at the center, promoting and maintaining a high level of physical, psychological and social satisfaction for each employee means initiating a radical change in the way of doing business.
Offer training and refresher opportunities, show appreciation and recognition for the work done and the commitment, encourage employees to seek a balance between work and private life (work life balance), equip them with resources, tools and a safe and healthy environment: all elements that contribute to personal well-being and that translates into the well-being of your organization .
Well-being at work: prevention is better than cure
According to the revelations made by Great Place to Work, 65% of the 900 European companies analyzed consider health and well-being is a strategic priority and 52% have devised support measures for employees under stress .
In particular, the three countries where health and well-being is given the highest priority are:
- France
- Sweden
- Holland
As highlighted by Eleonora Maglia, Researcher at the Luigi Enaudi Documentation Center in Turin, so that a culture of well-being is rooted within a company requires a strategic and protracted approach, so that a series of indications becomes a stable mode of action.
According to the Culture Audit, among the companies in Europe that activate best practices focusing on people, we find Canon which with the “Healthy in Canon” offers a range of inclusive activities. Cisco, on the other hand, has created dedicated areas and Bioage offers consultancy sessions for the examination of physical parameters and eating and daily habits. Finally, in some companies such as Amgen, healthy competition is promoted between groups of collaborators globally to reward those who achieve the greatest health progress in a month.
An intervention perspective – read on Mezzopieno News – time first to repair, cure and soothe stress and burnout conditions and to face all those manifestations in terms of behavior and health today appears absolutely adequate if not indispensable.
The precursors of this change were, in 2004, the researchers of the University of Sapienza coordinated by Francesco Avallone on the topic of organizational health, which represented a stimulus and an opportunity to experiment a new approach aimed at positively and preventively developing the health and well-being conditions of individuals and, at the same time, those of the organizational environment.
However, as recalled by Daniela Converso, professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Turin in “Wellness and quality of organizational life in health” (2012 ), supporting and pursuing a preventive and wellness promotion perspective was not easy.
First of all due to an extremely heterogeneous and critical vision on the part of managers towards well-being: “Some did not know what meaning to attribute to it within organizational contexts, others looked to the combination of well-being and workplaces with skepticism, even fearing that it could become a hymn to ‘laxity’ and only a minority believed it essential to invest in the direction of a better quality of organizational life to support those who, in these companies, represent the main asset and the guarantee of the quality of performance and of the services provided in health care organizations, ie workers ».
“Your work will fill a large part of your life. And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do a good job. And the only way to do a good job is to love what you do”
Steve Jobs
But how can we explain the importance of supporting the well-being or quality of services in times of crisis, budget cuts and human resource cuts?
Guido Sarchielli , Emeritus Professor of Work Psychology, argues that human capital is a collective good and, especially in times of crisis, it represents the condition for the success of a company because: “The quality of relationships, the degree of ease with which we cooperate, help others at work and resolve differences represent a value not only of an ethical nature, but also have a direct effect on ways of managing people, on the leadership to be adopted and on organizational learning, determining a positive impact on final performance “.
A good climate and a high level of well-being translate directly into company profits .
“Choose the job you love and you won’t work a day in your entire life”
Confucius
Well-being at work: not a simple definition
Today the opportunity and convenience of preventive action has been widely understood and there has also been a “normalization” of the concept of well-being.
As Daniela Converso points out: «If today we type this term in the string of a search engine, we obtain results in the tens of millions, which are halved if we combine the word wellness with work, and that drop to a tenth if the company is that of the organization ».
So what is meant by well-being?
We have already mentioned the commitment to escape the perspective centered on the absence of conditions of discomfort and we must also emancipate ourselves from certain options of health, fitness or wellness. With respect to work contexts wellbeing has at times been declined in terms of job satisfaction; while other authors have instead distinguished these two concepts by arguing that well-being concerns more generally the condition of “feeling good” in the workplace, with particular reference to the possibility of accessing the dimension of desire, or of create an active and responsible subjectivity at work.
Peter B. Warr has developed an original model, the Vitamin Model, which explains the two types of factors that can determine the well-being of workers:
- The former includes pay, security and social status, producing a constant effect – like vitamin C – and contributes to maintaining well-being levels
- the second, on the other hand, concerns the content of the job and offers opportunities for growth and learning in the performance of one’s job
This last factor has an effect that Warr defines as “additive”, that is able – like vitamin D – to positively affect the increase in individual well-being levels and concerns the opportunity control, use of skills and development of social contacts, involvement in external objectives, environmental clarity.
A further passage concerns the direct association of the term wellness with the organization, proposed in the last twenty years by a large number of studies and researches that refer to the most disparate disciplines:
- sociology
- anthropology
- economy
- jurisprudence
- medical and biological sciences
- psychology
Disciplines which, gradually over time, have also recognized the organizational context as a central role in defining people’s state of ease and well-being.