Looking back over the past two years, organisations are coming to two major realisations:

  1. If they can’t provide the kind of employee experience people want, they won’t be able to attract and retain top talent.
  2. Money alone doesn’t work. Employees are demanding more meaningful and more supportive work environments.

That could be why inclusion and wellbeing now consistently rank near the top of the list of what people want from their employee experience. After all, inclusion and wellbeing are crucial to creating a healthy, engaged culture – a culture in which employees feel valued. Now, Gympass and SafeSpace, a next-generation reporting platform that helps HR promote a healthy and inclusive workplace environment, are working together to help educate HR leaders to do just that. Stepping Into the Future of Work: How to Build Inclusion and Wellbeing In the Workplace is our newest guide designed to help organisations create employee experiences that drive engagement and retention. Below are three insights from the publication on how HR can build inclusion and wellbeing into the employee experience.  

  1. Close the “Employee Experience” Gap with Inclusion and Wellbeing

According to recent research from LinkedIn, 96% of talent professionals believe the employee experience is becoming more important, but only 52% believe their company provides a positive employee experience. In other words, HR knows the employee experience matters, but they also know that their organisations have a lot of work to do on the key elements of their cultures, processes and systems. 

Any healthy, talent-centric approach to culture must have inclusion and wellbeing at its centre; this is the only way to effectively address pressing concerns like diversity and employee burnout. If your people don’t feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work, their work will suffer. If your people are overworked and lack the resources and support to make healthy choices, both engagement and performance will drop. 

  1. Educate Your Leaders and Get Their Buy-in

We all know agents of change can achieve a lot with bottom-up initiatives. But for sustainable culture transformation, you need executive sponsorship. When someone at the senior level supports what you’re trying to do, it opens doors that would otherwise stay closed and gives you access to resources you might not otherwise have. 

  1. Listen to Your People

When you set out to address gaps or problems in your employee experience, make a concerted effort to understand the concerns and opinions of your employees. Great employee experiences start when HR cultivates a sense of empathy with employees. Pulse surveys, focus groups and townhalls, among other techniques, are an effective way to begin designing a more inclusive, healthy and engaging culture.

Building a foundation of inclusion and wellness in your organisational culture is some of the most important work you can do today. Your employees need a supportive, engaging work environment and your leaders need the gains in engagement and performance that will follow. 

Want to learn more about how inclusion and wellness programmes can improve your ability to attract, engage and retain top talent? Click here and get a copy of this guide from Gympass and SafeSpace.