Employee Wellbeing Leadership

A number of surveys are indicating that employers are paying more attention to employee wellbeing today than they have ever paid in the past. Workplace wellbeing practitioners should probably give thanks to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation, Great Quit,  Great Reshuffle, or whatever you want to call it. How long this attention by senior leadership will last is anyone's guess.

Personally, I believe that wellbeing leadership will be one of the new frontiers of employee and workplace wellbeing. I say that leadership will be a new frontier because, I believe, leading an employer’s wellbeing effort will be very different from leading the employee health focused efforts we have seen in workplaces over the past 50 years.

There will be no need for the leader to have a health related subject matter expertise because wellbeing is so much more than health. Health is but one domain of wellbeing. The problem is that there is no profession known as the profession of wellbeing. And since wellbeing is such a large, comprehensive array of domains, there is not likely to be wellbeing focused professional level education.

Based on my thinking at this point, the core of wellbeing leadership will be built on a foundation of people-centric leadership which includes such constructs as servant leadership and heart-centered leadership. Layered on top of the people-centric leadership foundation will be a layer I am calling the organizing layer. This layer would include the principles, philosophies and practices from the fields of organizational development and community organization and planning.

A third layer I envisioned is a layer I am calling Human Behavior in the Work Environment (HBWE). This layer is all about what it means to be a human and working in today's society and in today’s workplaces either on-site or remotely. This would include areas such as Positive Organization Scholarship and Positive Organization Behavior.

There may be additional leadership layers that have yet to enter into my consciousness, so my thinking remains a work in progress at this time. If you have any ideas or thoughts, please share them in the comments section below.

In addition to these broad concept layers, I have also been thinking about specific knowledges and skills the effective and successful future wellbeing leader should possess. Some of these might actually already be incorporated into one of the above concept layers, but here is the list anyway:

• Coordination skills
• Collaboration skills
•  Facilitation skills
•  Communication including dialogue and debate
•  Problem solving
• Critical thinking
• Decision making 
• Data science
• Program evaluation

These knowledges and skills are top of mind for me at the moment. This list of knowledges and skills is not meant to be exhaustive. If you have any other thoughts, ideas or suggestions, please share them in the comments section below.

There is general consensus that there will, at some point, be a new next, normal. I would suggest that there will also be a new employee wellbeing leadership model as part of this new, next normal.