Do you believe workplace wellbeing can ever be taken too far? Dr Helen Fitzhugh and Andrea James (University of East Anglia) asked this question of 25 managers from UK-based public, private and charitable organisations. Helen, a senior researcher and knowledge exchange fellow for the UEA’s Workplace Wellbeing Research Team, offers a ‘sneak peek’ of early findings from this research study. She outlines six dilemmas discussed by participants – see if they are ones you recognise?
From my time delivering evidence-based workplace wellbeing workshops for both the PrOPEL Hub and Evolve, I saw first-hand that discussions about workplace wellbeing can be controversial and even sometimes polarising. While we have good and increasing evidence that being attentive to the wellbeing of employees can be financially and culturally beneficial for a business and its workers, how you see and act upon this evidence is influenced by your own experiences and attitudes. As with all ideas of what is ‘good’, people sometimes disagree because they hold different values.
Attitudes towards workplace wellbeing continue to change and evolve as broader societal norms change and evolve. During and after the Covid-19 pandemic, many workplaces changed the way they view and act on workplace wellbeing. We wondered what the ‘pinch points’ might be right now – the areas where different values come into conflict for people making decisions that affect workers’ lives.
From this early review of evidence, we want to highlight six dilemmas and one ‘override’ condition.
Before reading the dilemmas, you should know that all the respondents were committed to workplace wellbeing in some form, some with more reservations, some with less. They kindly agreed to examine their values and attitudes with us and identify situations that may lead to dilemmas. Our conversations around workplace wellbeing were positive, thoughtful and reflective. So, as a reader, do not have the impression that the participants were anti-wellbeing because they explored the limits of wellbeing with us. In fact, by pushing them to discuss dilemmas, we can learn what it means to want strongly to do something ‘good’, but to still feel conflicted about what can be done.
We have offered some interesting quotes under each dilemma below. These are not given as ‘right’ answers to the questions, but instead for a flavour of the thoughtful conversations that informed this article. Be reassured no employees were ever identified in the course of these conversations and we have not labelled the quotes with even the sector or location, to protect this anonymity:
Six dilemmas:
- 1) How do you provide comprehensive support without being taken advantage of?
“… that whole line about until you’ve walked a mile in someone else’s shoes, you don’t know what they’re going through. … So you need that empathy… But at the same time, I think there is a little bit of a set of scales here between rights and responsibilities… I’ve seen the scales tip a little bit in terms of rights and responsibilities in favour of rights, certainly within my current workplace. And the fear is the scales tip back too much if we abuse it. I think that’s where I’m getting at when I feel like yeah, … you’ve got to remember why we’re here ultimately, and it’s a job, we’ve got a job to do.”
- 2) How do you support those in need but protect other colleagues while providing that support?
“There’s people who, consistent offenders, turning up late, disappearing when they’re meant to be working. So, what they’re actually doing is they’re letting other team members down around them. … But you can have the [‘are you ok?’] conversations and you can lead the horse to water but you can’t make it drink. They say well, there’s nothing wrong, but then they come into work late. Or they’ve come to work drunk … And you get to a point they’re being a danger to the people around them. So, you tend to veer towards the greater good.”
- 3) How do you ensure focussing on worker wellbeing does not tip over into intrusive interest in employee minds and bodies?
“In my opinion, it is absolutely not the responsibility of the workplace to tell people what’s healthy and what’s not… We’ve had some very clear feedback from our employees that they find that patronising. I personally agree with that. I also don’t think that there is an adult in the UK who does not know that cake is bad for them. And then they should probably do some exercise now and again. I don’t think it’s the employer’s job to do that, it’s Public Health England’s job to do that.”
- 4) How do you help team members understand when there is a real need to provide support to a colleague, without disclosing their colleague’s condition?
“… if teams are aware that people are off due to poor wellbeing as well, I think that’s really important, that we manage those conversations effectively. Because quite often, what will happen is people in the team will be aware of it, but it may be like the unspoken word. And it’s about being able to deal with it, obviously confidentially, and the way that also the person that’s not at work wants it dealt with. So, to the level of disclosure that they want to give. But also sometimes hiding things or not saying things is sometimes worse. Because it creates more noise around it, and it makes it bigger than it needs to be.”
- 5) How do you have difficult conversations (e.g. around performance) as a manager without being accused of insensitivity, or even bullying?
“I’m working with one of my direct reports at the moment, who is out of his depth. I recruited him into the role and he’s so far he is, he is absolutely not capable. … Last year I went through a complaint: one of my … reports was not performing and I had the conversation with her and I said you’re not delivering it. … That person then put a grievance in. So, I went through it … It’s a tricky, tricky situation and I came out of the end of it. I learned some lessons, but by and large the case wasn’t upheld. … Anyway, it was fine, but I still took some lessons from it and it was really interesting because now going through this with another colleague I’ve spoken to my boss, my boss had told me not to undertake any capability action because they know that if I do then I’ll get another grievance and a second grievance on the back of a first grievance.”
- 6) How to deal with severe mental health issues within the accepted framework of the organisation’s processes?
“He was very, very reluctant to go to his doctor or seek any of the other sources of support that we had. … first of all we had our occupational health nurse have a conversation with him and try to steer him to seek some other help. And her view was he probably wasn’t very well, but he then put in a complaint that she was spying on him, and that escalated itself. So, we were left with not much other option than to have a disciplinary process and say, if you keep behaving in this way, we will have to sanction you, and that could be quite serious. … He did then agree to go to the GP … and we had some help there. But it was a dilemma, because you don’t really want to put somebody in a situation, it was stressful for him to know that he was going through a disciplinary process. But there wasn’t another, it felt like we had exhausted our options there.”
We also identified one override condition – our research included examples of crises that seemingly overrode – in some people – any reservations to giving support. Our participating managers described how they were compelled to make ‘more human’ responses due to the surprising, severe, or overwhelming nature of each problem. Examples from our research included unexpected pregnancy, terminal cancer and suicide:
“So, it turns out, on the Saturday she’d had a baby, she hadn’t known she’d been pregnant … She’d had a baby, she was [young], she was all over the place, you know, didn’t know what to do… And so, there I felt there’s the ‘what you want to do as a workplace’, and then ‘what I wanted to do as a human to help another human’. So, we were able to offer a lot of support to that individual, we changed policies so she could have maternity leave. We had to move things around to make sure that she got absolutely everything she could possibly get.”
“So, we had a lady who worked with us for about 10 years, she was a really good member of staff, a really good team player and she got diagnosed with terminal cancer. So, the company supported her and they paid her right away through lockdown. Even though she said I’m gonna be leaving, they said don’t leave, we’ll pay you right the way through lockdown and then paid her beyond that.”
“So, we had a gentleman who tried to commit suicide … He came into work with a noose, a rope, to kill himself, so we put him in an office while we tried to get some critical care intervention. In the end, we put him in a hotel for three days to create a safe space … while we got the mental health intervention teams in the local area engaged. … Because of my moral compass, I can’t let that individual not have a safe space until we get the support and love around him.”
By thinking about these dilemmas, you may as a manager or HR practitioner be able to pre-empt what you might do in a crisis or reflect on similar experiences. A starting place for this reflection might be – do you instinctively agree or disagree with the dilemmas and quotes we have included in this article? What would you have done? In your opinion, is responding well to these dilemmas a matter of skills, experience and training or do you expect that different values might shape your response compared to others?
As researchers, we will take this work forward and do more in-depth study on the values considerations that mean these particular dilemmas exist right now. More in-depth analysis will be written up in an academic paper. When this is completed, we will share the revised findings with you. For now, we hope this has provided some rich food for thought on what goes into making difficult decisions on workplace wellbeing
