How to Foster Workplace Well-Being

This is the first part of a three part series

You would hardly find a large organization without a chief financial officer or chief operating officer on the org chart, or a large healthcare system without a chief medical or chief quality officer. These leadership roles reflect organizational priorities that are non-negotiable.

As workplaces undergo sweeping changes accelerated by (but ahead of) the COVID-19 pandemic, another organizational priority is quickly becoming non-negotiable: employee well-being. In healthcare, this organizational priority is increasingly being exercised by the Chief Wellness Officer (CWO) and his team. The CWO is responsible for measuring the well-being and its drivers and barriers of a specific group of health professionals, disseminating the results and providing guidance to institutional leaders on how to implement changes based on the data. The aim is to optimize the working environment and give employees the opportunity to develop.

The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated mental health and well-being needs in almost every part of society, such as families, schools and especially the workplace. Nowhere have these needs been more pronounced than among healthcare workers, particularly those on the front lines who have been providing unprecedentedly onerous care during the greatest public health crisis of our lives.

Accelerate trends that are already in motion

Even before the pandemic, it was well known that healthcare workers faced well-being challenges as early as medical school. By some estimates, more than half of physicians reported suffering from burnout, a condition that not only affects the well-being, morale, and overall health of the workforce, but also likely contributes to suboptimal patient care. An article in the American Journal of Medicine has suggested that just as new physicians take the Hippocratic Oath, they should also take an oath of self-care and well-being, including a vow to develop habits that promote humility, balance personal and professional life and “being attuned to the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs of one’s self and others.”

Four years ago, along with a number of colleagues, I wrote Making the Case for the Chief Wellness Officer in America’s Health Systems: A Call to Action health matters on the importance of executive leadership and the resources of the CWO office in addressing physician stress and its impact on patients, the healthcare system and society. The article made a case for elevating employee wellbeing into the C-suite and establishing an executive-level position dedicated to creating systemic change so individuals can thrive. Back then, there were only a small handful of healthcare systems with a CWO position.

We learned in the first wave of the pandemic that the presence of a chief wellness officer (or similar position) during the crisis had a protective effect on the workforce, making our 2018 call to action a wake-up call. At the start of the pandemic, organizations that already had a designated workforce wellbeing leader, such as a CWO, could pivot and provide support more quickly and effectively than those who had not. Organizations with wellness leaders were already attuned to what forces and drivers are affecting morale or undermining wellbeing, and could leverage or build on existing structures, data collection tools, and interventions to respond to the crisis with agility and speed.

Building on Lessons Learned

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we grieved our losses and wondered when we would return to our normal way of life. Now, more than two and a half years later, we know that where we are and where we are going is not “back” at all, but forward to a new normal. One element of the current context is the society-wide “Great Resignation”—or more specifically, the Great Reorganization. The upheaval in the workplace has been particularly hard-hitting in healthcare, where we see the dramatic effects of exhaustion, unrelenting hardship and workforce challenges.

This has added even more urgency to some of the questions we were asking ourselves before the pandemic: What can organizations do to better support their employees in a challenging area? How do we retain our employees in the healthcare professions? How do we improve efficiency so employees can spend more time on the elements of their work that they find most meaningful?

Crises create challenges that foster opportunities. As the pandemic sheds an even brighter light on wellbeing in the workplace, I hope we will accelerate the spread of Chief Wellness Officers, particularly in healthcare organizations but also as an example for other industries. In the near future, a chief wellness officer could be as integral a part of any healthcare organization as a chief financial officer, chief medical officer, or chief quality officer. That means non-negotiable.

This is the first in a three-part series looking at wellbeing at work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Part 2 charts the psychological toll on the workforce, particularly healthcare workers, in the early days of the pandemic and the support they needed from their workplaces. Part 3 looks at the lessons learned and how to build a culture of well-being that improves everyday working life to serve as a bulwark in future times of crisis.