Creating Your Well-Being Brand
So, you’re responsible for well-being and employee engagement in your business and you’ve invested in a comprehensive approach that is designed to maintain and improve levels of both. You’ve consulted with the HSE and other experts and you feel like you have the makings of a successful well-being strategy. But, has your set of well-being initiatives got an ‘identity’ – a compelling brand that engages your workforce with the various aspects of your approach to well-being and engagement? And if the answer is ‘yes’, have you engaged with and involved your workforce during process of building this brand?
Well-being professionals in public and private sector organisations tell us that this is very often an area that gets forgotten when it comes to planning the investment in well-being. And this is risky – because you can have the best strategy, conduct a high quality risk assessment, consult openly and implement fantastic interventions for your staff, but if they don’t buy into it success will be limited. That is, unless you can bring it all together under a single ‘umbrella’ and communicate this effectively to staff it’s very difficult to build the kind of momentum required to move towards a well-being culture.
So what is a well-being brand? Well, it’s much more than just thinking up a name for your well-being strategy. It’s about involving the key stakeholders for well-being at an early stage and working with them to explore the essence of the term – that is, defining what well-being really means ‘around here’. So typically, when our consultants work with clients on branding well-being they will assemble a broad cross-functional group (HR, Occupational Health, Divisional Health & Safety managers, Internal Communications, line managers) and facilitate a one day workshop. The aim is to consider what well-being means to your key organisational stakeholders – i.e. what value working in a ‘well organisation’ would add to their working lives.
As businesses work through this process a picture starts to emerge from the bottom upwards of what your staff mean when they talk about wanted a working environment characterised by ‘well-being’ and ‘employee engagement’. It is also an opportunity to link well-being to existing initiatives, strategic aims and other positive brands around the organisation. You end up with a set of 4-6 statements that sum up the kind of organisation that your well-being strategy will deliver for staff. Once you have this information you can start to consider a brand name to pull it all together that reflects what staff are telling you. Finally, you can consult with internal stakeholders more broadly to gather feedback on the emerging brand and to involve them in its creation.
The power of a high quality brand can be immense – you only have to look at how it works for the commercial giants of our age – Nike, Coca Cola, Ebay, YouTube, The Olympics, all have an attractive set of values attached to them. But it’s no different inside your organisation – and because you will have established a relationship with Internal Communications through the above process you can now work with them to promote your well-being brand actively. Together, you can ensure that every new well-being initiative that is launched is clearly branded as being part of your well-being strategy.
Over time your well-being strategy can become a valued and respected part of working life for staff, but this is very unlikely to happen if you implement a series of disconnected well-being initiatives with no cohesive brand identity to hold them together. Well-being is a cross-cutting issue – it touches health and safety, HR, management training, leadership development, talent management, Board Development and operational management (and more) – so it’s critical that we give it a strong brand identity if it is to thrive when we send it out into the organisation!!