by Brianna Crandall — October 26, 2015—Onsite fitness classes and free activity trackers are nice, but they are just tools for building a successful workplace wellness program, opines global professional services and investment management firm JLL. To make a more meaningful investment in employee health — and gain the productivity uptick that typically comes with it — companies need to move beyond wellness and think about the more comprehensive concept of well-being.
In a new report by JLL at the CoreNet Global Summit in Los Angeles, Bernice Boucher, managing director, Americas, of JLL’s Workplace Solutions team, advises looking at more than people and their physical health to drive engagement and productivity. Evidence shows investments pay off when tangible steps are taken to address the workplace surroundings and overall experience.
“There are a number of steps companies can take to transition from tactical wellness programming to a productivity-focused well-being strategy,” Boucher points out. “These can start with keeping employees focused on work instead of distractions like lighting, temperature and noise. You can then take it a step further by progressing to more strategic initiatives like designing programs that give employees a sense of purpose while connecting them to their work and the organization’s strategy.”
JLL’s 2015 Global Corporate Real Estate Trends (GCRES) survey found that corporate real estate (CRE) teams have a growing interest in workplace well-being and productivity as a measure of business strategy. More than 80 percent have executed programs that “improve the quality of the workplace” during the past three years. The survey also reveals that 62 percent of CRE executives are experiencing increasing demand from leadership to facilitate more flexible forms of working for employees, while 76 percent are seeing high expectations from the C-suite to enhance overall workplace productivity.
“Fostering improved employee well-being means making thoughtful decisions about the nature of the workplace environment,” says Boucher. “It’s important to take into account all of the different components that contribute to the experience of work and well-being. This usually comes back to avoiding what I call ‘crimes against productivity.’ They exist in almost every workplace and can have detrimental effects on employee experience and productivity.”
Boucher points to three repeat offenders in the crimes against productivity category that can be captured through comprehensive well-being programs, including:
- “It’s too hot” or “It’s too cold.” Physical comfort can profoundly impact workplace productivity — and is sometimes easily addressed by processes that do not require capital investment.
- “I can’t find a meeting room.” If innovation happens when employees collaborate, what happens when they waste time waiting for a place to work together? Designing offices with a substantial supply of collaboration and meeting spaces can reduce employee annoyance while supporting strategic objectives like driving innovation.
- “I don’t have the quiet or privacy to get my job done.” Concentration is critical to productivity, yet sometimes under-valued in today’s open plan offices. People who work in open areas frequently complain that they’re unable to concentrate, that there’s too much noise and distraction to get their job done. For employees who need to protect confidentiality, there is an added layer of concern that their jobs are not being performed with the proper amount of due diligence.
To quantify the results, some corporate real estate teams are now using sophisticated data and analytics techniques to determine which initiatives are helping so they can make decisions on how to continue to support employee well-being.
“With today’s tools and techniques, we can combine real estate metrics, such as total occupancy costs, with human resource measures, such as employee satisfaction survey results, to see which facilities are most conducive to high performance,” explains Boucher. “Using analytics can help a company make smart facility investments to foster well-being and ensure they are fit for the future.”
