Why Companies Must Develop the Whole Person in the Post-Pandemic Workplace
Sarah Larson
Talent Strategist, Organizational Thought Leadership, Independent Consulting
Before the pandemic, lack of career growth was one of the top reasons people quit their jobs. Savvy employers prioritized professional development to retain and engage their employees.
Then COVID sent us all home. We logged into our offices from our living rooms and helped our kids with their homework between Zoom calls. Work became interwoven with our lives, and this took its toll on our mental and physical health.
It’s become impossible to deny the reality that employees are people with multi-faceted development needs. Today's employees want to be developed as people, not just professionals. Professional growth and personal well-being are no longer mutually exclusive.
The new EVP must deliver value beyond the four walls of the office—beyond the traditional notion that employees are workers who simply want professional development. Corporate EVPs need to evolve to reflect what matters most to employees at work.
The ROAD: Four big human needs
So what human needs do organizations need to address in their EVP? The research is quite conclusive on four big needs:
R.
Recognition - Employees want to be valued for their efforts and achievements. Businesses must recognize them to motivate them to engage, perform and stay.
O.
Options - To answer the workforce’s desire for autonomy, companies must offer employees options and allow them to make choices within boundaries that protect productivity and corporate goals.
A.
Affinity - Workers are feeling the loss of the office as a social hub. They need to reclaim meaningful connections. Organizations need to offer ways to connect with the company, society and the most important people in their lives.
D.
Development - With mental health issues and financial hardship on the rise, employees care about more than just developing their professional skills. They want to develop personal skills to address their whole-person needs. Organizations must invest in developing employees as people, not just professionals.
This is the ROAD: a map to creating employee value based on meeting human needs post pandemic.
In this post, we are going to examine the fourth item on the ROAD: Development. We will discuss how organizations can meet their team members’ whole-person needs by developing them as people, not just as employees.
Behind the Need for Whole-Person Development
The traditional workplace placed a premium on developing employees’ professional skill sets. Training, seminars and off-site events were largely focused on company development or employee development, and in both cases the underlying message was the same: to companies, employees were the sum total of their professional abilities.
But societal upheaval and the pandemic have saddled the workforce—and everyone else—with mental health issues and financial hardship. Employees are now more concerned with addressing these needs than with simply developing their professional skills. They want to be supported as people, not just employees.
As Gartner found in its 2021 EVP Employee Survey, 68% of Generation Z employees value opportunities at work to learn skills that they can use in their personal lives. Despite this, only 5% of employees reported that their organization meets their need for both professional and personal opportunities for growth.
Organizations must take note of this trend and turn their focus to employees’ holistic well-being. Professional development is no longer enough.
The Way Forward on the ROAD: Encourage Whole-Person Wellness to Boost Your EVP
Wellness professionals agree that personal wellness isn’t limited to the physical or the mental health sphere. Human wellness involves multiple factors. If you do an internet search for “wellness wheel,” you’ll find countless brightly-colored images of wheels that are divided into segments including physical, spiritual, environmental, social and occupational wellness, among others. The number of segments varies by the wheel, but the idea is the same: Whole-person wellness is multi-faceted.
Traditionally, businesses focused on only one slice of that wheel: occupational, or professional development. But as we’ve seen, employees are no longer satisfied with this. To attract and retain employees, corporations need to touch multiple slices of the wheel, offering employees opportunities for financial, emotional, intellectual, physical, and social development, just for starters. The key to reaping the most benefits for your business is to help employees make a connection between their personal well-being and their professional satisfaction and performance.
For example, you can offer your employees a fitness stipend that they can use for things like joining a basketball league. Then help them connect that experience back to the workplace. Managers can hold one-on-one meetings with employees to ask three simple questions:
What did this opportunity teach you about yourself that you can apply to work?
What did you learn about your well-being that you can use to sustain your performance?
Who in your network could benefit from this experience?
The Benefits of Whole-Person Development
Developing the whole employee can boost career satisfaction, increasing retention rates and improving employee performance. The Gartner survey found that offering personal growth opportunities improves employee performance 2.5 times more than just offering professional growth opportunities. It also found that employees’ intent to stay at their company is 6.4% higher when they have opportunities for personal growth.
Companies can also save in other areas when they support holistic employee wellness. Workplace stress costs U.S. businesses $300 billion every year, and chronic disease comes with an annual price tag of $1.1 billion, according to Korn Ferry’s Future of work trends 2022.
It’s clear that companies can no longer focus simply on professional development. They must boost their EVPs by offering whole person development. Here are a few ways to start:
How to Develop the Whole Person in the Post-Pandemic Workplace
Fund physical well-being: Many companies encourage an active lifestyle by offering a fitness and wellness stipend. The benefit covers qualified expenses like fitness classes, team sports, and sports equipment for employees and eligible family members.
Support familial well-being.
At Atlassian, we partnered with Bright Horizons to help employees manage work, family, and personal responsibilities. With Bright Horizons Back-Up Care, employees can arrange care for their children, adults, and elderly family members when necessary.
A lot of companies are also partnering with Wellthy, which can help by providing employees with families a dedicated Care Coordinator. The Care Coordinator helps tackle the logistical and administrative tasks of caring for children, elderly and others.
Support financial well-being.
Companies can link up with organizations like BrightPlan to offer financial wellness resources. BrightPlan is a comprehensive financial wellness platform created to help employees accomplish financial life goals. It offers access to financial planning advice, financial advisors, smart budget and spending analysis, and more.
Partner with wellness companies to offer benefits to employees: Develop robust employee assistance programs that provide immediate support from specialists to help with issues including stress, anxiety, depression, financial or legal questions, marriage and parenting issues, substance abuse, and more.
While I was vice president for talent at Atlassian, we invested in ongoing partnerships with companies like Thrive Global and Recalibrate. These partnerships provided employees with resources and tools to manage stress, improve focus, strengthen connections with others, and shore up overall well-being.
We also provided accessible, always-on resources from Modern Health to help employees prioritize their mental and physical health and manage stress, anxiety, and depression. Rally Wellness Coaching is another vendor that provides similar services.
Where possible, make behavioral health and substance abuse plans available so that employees can obtain access to the right care at the right time.
Prioritize paid leave policies and bereavement leave programs. No employee should have to choose between their job and taking care of themselves or their loved ones.
Our EVPs must offer opportunities for personal wellbeing and growth outside of work. Employees increasingly will not settle for less. Holistic employee Development is non-negotiable on the ROAD to retention and engagement.
Learn more about the other steps on the ROAD: Recognition, Options, and Affinity.
Learn more about the changes to the workplace and the ROAD to retention and engagement.