With employee Alarmingly, Canadian workers are looking more stressed and less sure about why their work matters these days, according to a recent study. Overall wellbeing in Canada sits at 43.7 out of 100, with a 15-per-cent drop in workers’ sense of purpose in only six months, according to a report by Dialogue Health Technologies. And Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report puts global engagement at just 21 per cent — which has flattened since the pandemic after years of increases — with lost productivity draining US$438 billion from the world economy in a single year. In Canada, productivity has been declining for decades, as real GDP per capita has dropped from 3.5 per cent in the early 1970s to just under 0.5 per cent currently In the US and Canada, only about a third of employees are engaged at work, according to the report. And when the “why I’m here” belief collapses, productivity follows. Higher absence, slower teams, and rising safety incidents are now business problems, not just HR headaches. So, can business leaders stop the wellbeing plummet and jolt their organization’s productivity — or has wellness
Strategic investment in mental health, wellbeing
“We need to be very strategic around pitching the investment and funding towards mental health,” says Tammy Sergie, Chief HR and Privacy Officer at mental health and addiction treatment organization EHN Canada.
“There’s a lot of dialogue around the importance of mental health and the impact it has on businesses and why, but we need to be strategic around positioning the value in front of the decision-makers — we need to look at other metrics that are measurable in the world of people, like turnover and productivity, and ways that better track the cost of absenteeism in our organizations.”
Sergie believes that until HR leaders can “monetize some of the symptomatic reactions” to the impact of poor mental health, wellbeing will stay a poster on the wall instead of a line on the CEO’s dashboard.
“The reality is that mental health is multifaceted and you can’t segregate a human into specific buckets,” she says. “An individual in the workplace is still an individual and a whole, so their financial well-being, their emotional well-being, and their physical well-being is all one well-being, so employers need to find a way to invest in all aspects of that relationship with their employees.”
The real cost of stress and disengagement
Dialogue’s data shows Canadians rating mental health, sleep, financial security, work environment and work-life balance as critical to their well-being, yet roughly a third feel negative about each and say things have worsened over the past year. At the same time, Gallup finds workers in North America among the most stressed in the world, with stress now tied less to personal resilience and more to how organizations are run.
Translate that to a large organization — if stress and weak purpose push even 10 per cent of staff into chronic absences, burnout, or quiet quitting, it’s not just a morale issue. The organization may have to deal with understaffed shifts, missed deadlines, more safety incidents, and managers burning time replacing people instead of delivering strategy
If the wellbeing slide is going to be slowed or even reversed, HR leaders are the ones who have the data that can reveal the pain points.
“There are nuances and data points available to the HR team and we need to learn to be more strategic around how we use that data,” she says. “And then put that monetized big picture to the board and the executive team and really continue to lobby the importance of the investment in this particular initiative.”
In a large organization, those signals are louder: clusters of disability claims that quietly push benefits premiums up; whole teams with rising sick time; voluntary resignations where employees walk away without another job: “Are you leaving an organization without a job? That, to me, is an indicator that a person likely got to a point of burnout or breaking point,” says Sergie.
A C-suite scorecard for wellbeing
With employee wellbeing flattening and
<p><em>This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in March focuses on mental health. Full coverage can be found here.</em></p></div>”>
