This is an interesting thought leadership piece which highlights two important issues for me.
The first is that many employers seem to think that the health and wellbeing of employees is all down to HR. This is not the case and sometimes puts unrealistic expectations on what HR can deliver on its own.
There is a growing body of opinion that in fact the biggest influence is the leadership and culture of an organisation reflected in the quality of employee engagement. This translates into the levels and causes of absence, particularly around mental health.
Whilst HR has a mandate to devise and implement aspects of health and wellbeing strategy including line manager support, it will not succeed without active sponsorship from the board or equivalent.
The second issue is brought out in Colin's comments about how services such as Employee Assistance Programmes \(EAPs) are sometimes purchased. Very often it is a purchase made in isolation and ticks the box of first line legal defence against stress claims.
The danger here is that employers do not use it as a live tool to understand where points of pressure exist and what they can do about it. They become reactive to certain situations only when problems manifest themselves and when it might be too late.
If an approach to employee health and wellbeing is based on trying to outsource underlying organisational issues to an external provider without understanding what they are first, they will not just go away.
John Picken www.shandwell.com
