Emotional Well-Being Is The New Frontier

If you’re not supporting the emotional well-being of your employees, handing out pedometers or apples isn’t going to amount to much. Early in July, Arianna Huffington in a post entitled, “Big Business Finally Learns that Wellness is Good Business” offered an impressive roundup of wellness initiatives that big businesses have taken on. What’s most significant is that big business is turning its sights to the impact that emotional well-being--stress management, resilience and mindfulness--can have on the productivity, capacity and motivation of people. And they are seeing it as a must have for every employee, right up there in importance with fitness, weight management, and healthy lifestyle programming. “Making sure employees have the inner resources,” as she describes it, is key, not only to their productivity but also, it turns out, to their physical well-being. This approach flies in the face of accepted thinking about work, stress, and wellness and it’s about time. Emotional well-being has conventionally been seen as the domain of crisis based solutions: employee assistance programs, counseling, hotlines. But today’s workforce is anything but conventional: The modern workforce has dizzying demands on their time, and they don’t all work one way, nor do they have the freedom to “only” work on one thing or another: about 75 percent of employees are parents; more than a third of employees are non-professional caregivers; and 47 percent of employees are part of dual-income households. Along with this shifting demographic, the new reality is that there are no hard lines between work and home, personal and professional. People now tend to bring their whole selves to work, including their stressors and emotions every day. In our work with employers who use meQuilibrium, our cloud-based solution for building the resilience of their employees, we see some very interesting correlations which support this. It’s not the job that stresses people It’s common assumption that work alone causes stress, but in our experience, work itself is not the primary source of stress for most people. People regularly cite family, success and money as their key sources of stress.  In other words, people consistently rank family and success as higher than ‘their job’ when queried about what are their main sources of stress. Three powerful correlations between inner and outer well-being: