4 minute read
Why Hong Kong needs a corporate wellness paradigm shift now
ADRIAN STONES
ADRIAN STONES
Founder & Managing Director at Zenshin
Three reasons why Hong Kong needs a corporate wellness paradigm shift now and five ways to make it happen in your company Hong Kong scores the lowest out of eight global markets when it comes to well-being.
Cigna Hong Kong conducts an annual 360° Well-being Survey, tracking the perceptions of health and well-being of individuals by looking at five key areas: physical, family, social, financial and work health. This survey covers eight markets, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States. But, if you look back on the past few years that this survey has been conducted, Hong Kong has consistently placed near the bottom of the list.
We have a long-term wellness crisis now at tipping point in Hong Kong and increasing expectations that companies do something about it. But what can corporations in Hong Kong do to effectively address this crisis? Put a different way, what can companies do that is not ‘wellness-washing”, or the wellbeing equivalent of “greenwashing” in the environmental movement?
Sustainability is increasingly finding its way into boardrooms and executive teams in Hong Kong. Leaders must become more adept at managing these seemingly opposing forces. Corporate wellness is an example of this type of paradox. Seen through a more traditional lens, it can be viewed as a cost to the business. Seen through the increasingly accepted lens of “sustainability”, it is more accurately viewed as a cost that is not only the ethically correct choice, but it also has measurable, tangible benefits for employees. Those happier employees will experience higher engagement and work quality, which result in increased innovation and happier customers. Happier employees also reduce the number of HR- and compliance-related incidences— and their associated costs.
Everyone is experiencing COVID-19 in their own, unique way. There are some common themes though—resilience, burnout, mental health, and vulnerability. These are all extremely useful focal areas whilst we are passing through a crisis. However, the day will soon come when vaccines are widely distributed and therapeutics improve to the point where COVID -19 becomes more similar to the annual influenza season in terms of its societal impact. And then, focal areas will shift again to helping people emerge from this pandemic.
Rather than reacting to the crisis in front of us now, we should take a step back and think holistically about what really makes up “wellness”. The term “wellness” has been misappropriated by certain industries and that has clouded its true meaning. Wellness in its truest sense is defined as “a delicate balancing act between an individual’s social, emotional, psychological and physical assets (resources) and the particular social, emotional, psychological and physical liabilities (challenges) they are facing in life and work at any one time”.
Wellness is not just whether or not someone is sleeping or eating properly. Just because you offer a dental plan to your employees does not mean you have a corporate wellness program.
It covers a wide range of components—authentic relationships, meaning and purpose, intellectual engagement, resilience, balance and boundaries, and energy and vitality. Most corporate wellness programs focus on the last three components—but that means that companies are leaving the strongest drivers of wellbeing unaddressed within the context of wellness. With “wellnesswashing” on the rise, it is critical that companies start with the kind of holistic definition I mention above.
Once you do that, it should become apparent that there is a lot of science behind “wellness”. The science, while relatively new, is still solid and points to tangible benefits to those who follow it.
However, given the complexity associated with defining, measuring and then positively impacting wellness, most corporations find that they just don’t have that kind of skill set internally. HR will be tasked with “making it happen”, but this is new for them, too.
There is nothing wrong with admitting that this is a new field. Find experts you can trust to bring you the science, not the hype. Bring in those experts to help you quickly ramp up. Learn all you can and make that knowledge part of your corporate playbook.
Turning to a different report also released by Cigna called “Health And Wellness In Workplaces: What Works?”, they found that “programs delivered at an individual level are most successful when they aim to reduce specific health risks, while programs delivered to the entire workforce are most successful when they promote healthy behaviors in general and develop a culture of wellness in the organization.”
One-off workshops help build awareness and invariably generate high levels of participation—workers in Hong Kong are clamouring for better wellness programs at work—but then engagement can drop off if the program hasn’t been designed to maintain momentum.
Changing long-held personal habits is not easy. Doing that in an environment that doesn’t support staff? Impossible.
The best way to support staff to make these difficult changes is to design and implement company-wide programs that create a culture of wellness and are led out-front by the company’s leaders, while hyper-personalizing wellness coaching and support for employees. Two tiers, in parallel, interacting and working together. Turning back to the paradox of ““purposeful profiteer””, companies still find it challenging to quantify the ROI of their corporate wellness programs.
To overcome this challenge, companies need to define parameters for success up-front. Create feedback loops in an agile manner that allow you to dial up or dial down certain programs and interventions, depending on how they are being received and the kind of measurable ROI they are generating.
