The Rise of the Employee Well-Being Communicator

What is the ROI of an internal communications leader focused on well-being?

Organizations bleed millions annually when employees abandon paid time off and ignore existing mental health benefits. Establishing a dedicated "Employee Well-Being Communicator" immediately drives massive ROI by ensuring front-line managers continuously train their teams on utilizing life-saving health benefits and rebuilding systemic corporate trust.

Leaders, consider your next internal communications role centered exclusively on employee culture and well-being. If done right, such a role could turn burned-out employees into healthy ones, saving your company millions of dollars annually.

First, a few data points:

- We are not taking our paid time off. According to the U.S. Travel Association, Americans leave an average of a full week of paid time off on the table per year, and only 25 percent of Americans use all their paid time off. This has a direct impact on the bottom line of organizations, as well as an indirect effect on productivity, burnout, and subsequent resignations.

- We are not using our benefits. Gartner revealed that although 87% of employees have access to mental and emotional well-being offerings, only 23% use them. Ensuring people are clearly, concisely, and consistently aware of company benefits has a significant financial and reputational impact.

- We are in a trust crisis. A Slack survey reveals that more than 1 in 4 desk workers do not feel trusted at work. The same survey says that trusted employees report 2.1x better focus, 2x higher productivity, and 4.3x greater overall satisfaction with work. Building trust across your workstreams has a clear impact on several business objectives.

The common thread through those data points is the role strategic communications and internal relationships play in solving these critical challenges.

Elevating a strategic communications role centered on the well-being and culture of your organization is a critical growth path opportunity for our profession and one that solves a critical business need.

Those in our industry have unique skills to 1) do the proper research in understanding challenges unique to every organization, 2) set appropriate goals and objectives to solve those challenges, 3) flawlessly strategize and execute a communication plan, and 4) measure its success.

In close partnership with executives and human resources teams, the role fulfills four primary functions to reach the needs of individual contributors, people managers, and executives.

- Elevating the definition of well-being. This includes setting and executing a communication strategy to ensure all activities regarding employees’ health are communicated effectively through a holistic look at well-being — career, community, financial, mental, physical, and social.

- Cross-function relationship building. Understanding bespoke challenges by workstream and working with leaders of that workstream and their HR business partner to create and execute their own strategy.

- Front-line communication training on employee well-being. Many organizations are sorely missing training on how new managers should talk with their teams. This role would also lead conversations with front-line managers on strategically communicating employee benefits to their teams.

- Strong partnership with marketing. Finally, you should work with marketing to ensure your company’s website and other materials that share what life is like at your company are highlighted.

Where this role “sits” within an organization will vary. It needs to be in a position to have access to executives, employee engagement, people managers, leadership and development, and other groups in which this person will play a significant role.

This role is a critical path unique for those in our profession to employ. I look forward to seeing how this evolves in the coming years.