Years ago, before starting SuperWellness and embarking on a career in workplace wellbeing, my first career was in marketing. I worked in technology and the IT industry, and the products and services I was in charge of promoting certainly weren’t the most glamourous: they included remote meter reading devices, lasers for hair and tattoo removal, and lastly, for over 10 years, IT service management and helpdesk software.
I might not have had a heartfelt passion for these things, but I always got a buzz from helping the companies I worked for win over new clients and seeing how powerful marketing can be. Now that I’m lucky enough to have found something I believe in passionately and have a strong personal purpose to promote, the lessons I learnt from my years in marketing are more relevant than ever.
Working with workplace wellbeing leads, I get to hear how hard it can be to get their message across, influence the right people and gain support for their wellbeing vision, whether it’s the senior leaders they are making a business case to, line-managers used to working a certain way, or colleagues who don’t want anything to do with wellbeing. There are so many barriers: wellbeing competing with other comms and overflowing mailboxes, chronically overloaded diaries, and differing interpretations of what wellbeing even means.
Here are three key learnings I took away from my years in marketing and how they might apply to the world of workplace wellbeing.
#1: Promoting wellbeing starts with defining and explaining it clearly
Marketing sometimes gets a bad rap: manipulative tactics designed to control people’s behaviour and unfortunately, like most things, it can be used for shady purposes as well as good. Having said this, when you are promoting something you believe in, with a positive intent, the key to success is often much more straightforward: to explain it in a way that makes sense and that dispels confusion and misunderstanding.
And the level of misunderstanding around workplace wellbeing cannot be overstated. When you say the words ‘workplace wellbeing’, different people will conjure up very different mental images: some might see a group of employees huddled around a pizza or a box of doughnuts, some might even picture a spa. To some people it will conjure up fitness nuts, and to others, issues of stress, burnout and mental health.
So my top tip here is: don’t assume people know what wellbeing means. Share your definition at every opportunity, use references, paint a picture of the outcomes, engage people in conversations about their interpretation, aim to challenge misconceptions and dispel myths.
#2: What’s in it for them?
This is one of the first rules of marketing I learnt. When one of the directors reviewing my work turned to me with a quizzical look and asked: ‘Have you heard of wiffem? Wiffem is missing here….’ I gave him a blank look so he spelt it out for me: “W-I-F-M – what’s in it for me? What’s in it for them?” I had blithely written my piece (I can’t remember what it was, but it must have been making an ask of someone I thought might help us raise our profile in some way…) but neglected to highlight how this might benefit them. Oops.
This is a valid learning when it comes to wellbeing as well. A common justification for wellbeing that is given is to have a positive impact on employee health, and of course this is top of the list. However, this may not be getting the best outcome when you are looking to promote your vision for workplace wellbeing. Aside from those who will immediately think: ‘employees’ health is outside of our remit and we are not here to tell people how to look after their health’ (and I’m not debating the value of this argument here, simply stating that this is still a widely held view), aside from this, it fails the W-I-F-M test.
The thing is that wellbeing implemented well will undoubtedly result in a plethora of benefits, whether it’s doing the right thing morally, or making line-managers’ lives easier, or helping the business be more successful in its market. The outcome in the end should still be a positive effect on employee health, however savvy wellbeing leads will recognise that every ‘stakeholder’ will have a different motivation and the best results will come from recognising what this is, and adapting the message accordingly.
#3: A story is more powerful than a thousand stats
In my helpdesk software days, I often visited clients to interview them and write a case study about how our software had helped their business. I would start by outlining the problems and headaches they’d had, the key steps they’d taken, and the benefits they were reaping as a result. Although the formula was always the same, every story was different and unique. Invariably there would be a human side to it that anyone reading could relate to, whether it was alleviating stress or helping a team to win an award they were proud of. Importantly this would bring to life the benefits of buying our software for potential clients, and I believe there’s an insight here for wellbeing too.
As a wellbeing lead, a lot rides on being able to make a compelling business case that will allow you to secure budget, resources and endorsement from the senior leadership team. This process is not for the faint hearted, since the benefits of workplace wellbeing are notoriously hard to measure. Some aspects can be quantified, but many of its outcomes are intangible, such as the impact on employee goodwill or brand perception.
It’s certainly a good idea to include some stats from recent industry reports or academic research, showing trends (evolving employee priorities and expectations for example) and estimated return on investment figures, such as Deloitte’s much referred to finding that every pound invested in workplace mental health programmes typically results in a five pound return.
The limitation of these statistics is the fact they are so generic. How will they apply for the organisation in question? And this is where the value of telling a story comes in. Start with the organisation’s biggest pain points, outline your recommended steps and paint a picture of the outcomes a year down the line. What improvements might come about for different groups of people within the organisation? What headaches could be alleviated? And what would it take to get to these outcomes? The more vividly you can describe it all (a bit like a case study from the future), the more clearly others will be able to picture what you have in mind, and buy into your vision.
As part of the work we are doing at SuperWellness we are developingtraining and a community of peers that will be truly practical and relevant for wellbeing leads. If this is something you would be interested in, please click this link to find out more.
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How to make a business case for workplace wellbeing
