The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that get at the well-being of your workforce, including questions about employee satisfaction and health and the support you provide through services and benefits. Scientists at Gallup have been studying workforce well-being for more than 50 years. Two of these scientists wrote a book about it called Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements.

According to Gallup’s research, there are universal elements of well-being that differentiate thriving from struggling. They have grouped them in five categories:

• Career Well-Being: How you occupy your time or how much you like what you do every day.
• Social Well-Being: Having strong relationships and love in your life.
• Financial Well-Being: Effectively managing your economic life.
• Physical Well-Being: Having good health and enough energy to get things done.
• Community Well-Being: A sense of engagement with your community.

According to the book’s authors, when these factors are fully realized, people thrive.

An article on the Gallup Management Journal (click here) explains why this matters. Most of us believe that happy and healthy people get sick less often than miserable people. According to Gallup’s data, workers with the lowest well-being scores cost their companies $28,800 a year in lost productivity from sick days. In contrast, workers with the highest well-being scores cost their companies just $840 dollars.

That’s an astounding discrepancy! The data suggest that it is worth an organization’s time and money to improve their workforce well-being. That means paying attention to all five elements.

• Career Well-Being: Engage your employees. Gallup found a strong correlation between employee engagement and well-being.
• Social Well-Being: Gallup’s research shows that people need six hours of social time every day. That doesn’t mean six hours hanging around the water cooler, but it does suggest that teams, mentoring, training, and other social interactions improve well-being.
• Financial Well-Being: Financial security is integral to well-being.
• Physical Well-Being: The number of organizations that are implementing programs to improve the wellness of their employees indicates that this element has become mainstream.
• Community Well-Being: More and more people, most notably younger workers, want to feel like the work they do makes a difference not just to their organization’s bottom line, but to society as a whole.

The article concludes that “businesses would be wise to measure and manage” employee well-being. That’s a Baldrige perspective.

To read more about workforce well-being, click on these articles:

• Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline
• Why HR Needs Baldrige
• Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement
• 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
• The 3 Factors That Motivate Employees

(5 votes, average: 4.20 out of 5)

 Loading ...