This seems like a really bad time to raise the question of what is going on with employee wellness in the workplace in the private, non-profit and government sectors. However, employee wellness is tied to productivity and both should be on the mind of organization leaders looking to maintain organizational effectiveness in challenging economic times.
The common wisdom is that people should be happy that they have a job and should not be complaining if the cost of having that job is doing the work of the people who previously worked both to the right and left of them. In government, employees are under close scrutiny by citizenry and legislatures to ensure they are not "loafing" when they are being paid by everyone's hard earned tax dollars. At the same time, many government employees are expected to do more to administer the various financial aid packages voted by Congress or to provide services to the increasing legions of the unemployed. In some offices just at the time when employees are under this increased stress, money for employee wellness is being reduced. My sense is that such programs as employee wellness are seen as extravagant by taxpayers and government officials.
This all seems a bit counter intuitive to me at a time when all employers - public and private are grappling with increased healthcare costs and when the common wisdom is more and more recognizing that disease prevention is much less expensive than disease treatment. It is also counter-intuitive to me because it should also be common knowledge that sick employees who are either at home or on the job or stressed out are less productive.
One of the major blocks to productivity in performing work are bottlenecks. In a traditional manufacturing setting, bottlenecks can be identified where all the work starts piling up in front of one machine. This could be because that specific machine cannot handle the volume produced by other machines earlier in the process or because that machine or the worker operating it take longer. If that machine tries to do more than it is capable of, it breaks down. In any case, one has very visible evidence of problems in the work process.
These visual clues are less evident in knowledge-based government jobs. How does one notice work piling up in front of one employee's desk? How does one notice that the work process is unbalanced where too many people provide work to one person? How does one notice when the demands on a given person or group skyrocket and become more than that person or group can handle? How does one notice when any one person has reached the point of breakdown. The ability to notice is further reduced in a hierarchical environment where people feel constrained or even intimidated from speaking up.
The result of this scenario is that problems in the government production system remain undiagnosed and not attended to. In this case, I include the human being as part of the production system. The symptoms that could lead to a diagnosis of the "human machine" are illness, anger on the job, reduced social interaction, or lessening energy due to stress. The more extreme and, therefore, more noticeable symptoms are heart attacks and suicide.
In the manufacturing environment, we call upon equipment maintenance as well as the operations experts to respond to some of these equipment bottlenecks. In the government sector or other knowledge-based environments (as well as in manufacturing environments), we should be calling upon the employee wellness function along with the operations experts.
I fear that we are not, because the symptoms of lessening productivity or employee wellness are not visible. Even if they were, we would need ideas and commitment to effectively respond to improve both productivity and employee wellness.
I have developed a tool that makes these symptoms more visible which I have used in recent work with clients. I have also worked with client groups to develop ways to support employee wellness. Helpful responses to issues of productivity and wellness include increased collaboration and a more balanced distribution of the workload using teams. To be effective in the long run, the connection between productivity and employee wellness must be recognized. Goals for employee wellness should have the same status as other goals.
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