CONNECT
Issue 16
Real-time employee access to two-way communication and self-care options Enabling employees to immediately take steps to improve their behavioral health and emotional well-being is critical to maintaining employee engagement and delivering personalized solutions. For example, the employee can receive tailored interventions when they receive their results metrics and feedback. Predictive insights Employers need to leverage behavioral science and artificial intelligence to find the correlations between an employee’s emotions, moods, and feelings and their behaviors and resilience. These predictive insights enable employers to match support and intervention programs with the current and future needs of the overall workforce and specific individual employee groups (e.g., mothers working remotely, Gen Z age group).
Employee data collection and measurement Employers need to understand the employee’s underlying emotions, moods, and feelings about themselves and their workplace that drive individual health behaviors and resilience. However, the current assessment models available to employers are inadequate. Engaging, efficient, and more effective digital measurement tools are emerging to capture real-time data on the employee’s terms – by computer, tablet, or smartphone. They provide the employee with immediate scores and feedback on their shared information.
Long-term impact of the pandemic on employee behavioral health
• 90% of employers reported Covid-19 had a negative impact on employee well-being and productivity since the 1st quarter of 2020. • Over $1 billion per week in additional lost productivity has occurred due to pandemic-related absenteeism. • 70% of employees say the pandemic is the most stressful period of their lives. The pandemic has threatened each employee’s safety and the safety of their loved ones on a local, national, and global basis. Workforce resilience means an employees’ ability to recover from the pandemic threats to a sense of personal safety and productivity – by overcoming the stress, anxiety, loneliness, irritability, depression, fatigue, and other emotions, as well as physical health issues, experienced since March 2020. As the workplace reopens, the wide-ranging resilience of employees is bringing a potentially different long-term employee perspective about work and their employer. This is playing out through the Great Resignation and other unexpected workplace challenges.
Employers are proactive in reducing the stigma of mental/behavioral illness. They’re increasing provider and treatment access (especially digital solutions), and broadening wellness into well-being programs to address social, emotional, and financial as well as physical health preventive and self-care interventions. Short-term impact of Covid-19 pandemic on employee behavioral health Covid-19 has turned the employer-employee relationship upside down since 2020. From employee physical health risk management to new work models and environments, employers and employees have quickly assessed, responded to, and adapted to what is happening around them. As the pandemic continues, the related change and uncertainty have caused unparalleled levels of employee mental and behavioral health problems: • Employees with mental and behavioral problems jumped from 27% pre-Covid-19 to 50% by January 2021.
Richard Tewksbury Jr. has 40 years of
There may be foundational changes in the future employer-employee relationship and the increasing importance of workplace health. Employers need to double down on understanding the behavioral health of their workforce to restore and strengthen resilience, purpose, commitment, and productivity. A healthy working environment has new employer meaning that includes prevention, early detection, responsibility, and resolution of employee physical and behavioral health issues. The breadth of potential workforce change and uncertainty accelerates the employer’s need to fully understand the ongoing scope of employee behavioral health issues. Remote, hybrid or in-office work environments, employee and supervisor interactions, performance management processes, organization culture and effective leadership, career and company “loyalty”, work-life balance dilemma – future workplace norms still are in flux. At the same time, employers need to expand their employee emotional well- being support to address both dominant overall workforce needs and the specific challenges of employee groups and individuals. The inequity of burnout (female employees are 2x more likely than male employees to have impactful burnout levels) and the ergonomic, social, and emotional impact of working remotely for employees with and without dependents are just a few of the reasons leaders need new tools and resources to support their workforce and manage their workplace. New employee health insights and management tools To deal with the “new” workplace and workforce, employers first need to build and sustain employee trust. Real-time, action- oriented information from the employee that’s strategically aggregated at population level is required. Leaders need to rethink the employee experience in ways that respect individual differences and deliver workforce- desired employer support. To accomplish these objectives, employers need creative new management tools and resources.
experience in health care and employee benefits consulting. He is President and Co-Founder of ADoH SCIENTIFIC®, an applied affective science assessment and data science company. His primary responsibility is revenue growth through the company’s two primary registered products, Affective Determinants of Health (ADoH®) and Affective Determinants of Wellbeing (ADoW®).
Needs segmentation and stratification
These data measurement tools also are valuable in identifying the behavioral differences by employee factors and groupings, e.g., gender, age, job type, parental status, remote or onsite work locations, and unique risk severity levels.
Determinants of health
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