WHY L+H EXISTS
82% of businesses increased spend on wellbeing in the past year, but 91% employees frequently feel overwhelmed with stress and 90% are disengaged from the workplace.
IT’S NOT WORKING.
BUSINESSES ARE SPENDING MORE
Employee wellbeing accounted for more than $40bn of global business spend in 2023, is set to be $60bn by 2026 and account for over $75bn by 2030 and in the past year, 82% of UK businesses have increased their investment in wellbeing.
DESPITE INVESTMENT, THINGS ARE GETTING WORSE
in 2024 Gallup reported that 90% of employees were disengaged from their workplace and a YouGov survey reported that 91% of UK workers felt frequently overwhelmed with stress and 20% of them took time off work because of this.
84% OF LEADERS WANT TO IMPROVE CULTURE
SO WHERE ARE WE GOING WRONG?
WE NEED ‘WELL-WORKING’ TOO!
Most wellbeing initiatives focus 1) solely on the individual 2) primarily on healthier lifestyles outside work and personal wellbeing.
These initiatives are great and long may these positive perks and benefits continue. But practically all the data from employee research tells us it’s the
1) the work (resourcing, deadlines, capacity, clarity)
2) the working together (communication, leadership, team dynamics)
that are the areas causing the most stress for employees at work and while wellbeing perks might ease the pain, they don’t tackle the root cause.
CONNECTION IS KEY
The world’s longest study on health & happiness, conducted by Harvard over 80 years, showed that the biggest influence on our wellbeing is the quality of our relationships with others.
It’s more impactful than smoking, diet or exercise.
No wonder the workplace is so influential on our overall health…!
WHAT CAN WE DO?
TACKLE THE ROOT CAUSE, NOT JUST THE SYMPTOMS
Boosting resilience to stress by improving overall health is great, but let’s also look at the root cause.
As well as supporting individual health, let’s invest in creating healthy collectives by building and nourishing healthy social containers for collaboration communication to happen, built on the foundations of healthy relationship dynamics and healthy ways to tackle conflicts and challenges - together.
IT’S A TWO-WAY STREET
While healthy individuals do indeed create healthy teams, we also need to build healthy organisational ecosystems that create the conditions for the healthy relationships that promote the well-being of the individuals who work in them.
PEOPLE ARE PLANTS. ORGANISATIONS ARE ECOSYSTEMS.
Like plants, people are unique and the conditions that make them thrive are bio-individual. And like plants, people thrive in connection with the beings around them. Like ecosystems, organisations are interdependent systems where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.