Boomers … Plus Overall Productivity Related to ‘Wellbeing’
As mentioned in the last article, Gallup Poll research in November 2019, shows, through an article by Ryan Wolf, has revealed five interconnected elements of wellbeing — career, social, financial, physical and community wellbeing — that affect everything from our job performance to our health status.
Baby Boomers: Born Between 1946 and 1964
Baby boomers are moving into the tail-end of their careers, but that doesn’t mean they all want to finish strong and ride off into the sunset. Boomers are often thought of as loyal to employers and teams and want to contribute whole-heartedly to the organization until they feel like they’re done.
- Which is when they feel they can afford it — and rising healthcare costs mean many can’t.
- Your company’s health benefits play an important part in this. Your baby boomer employees need to understand how their employee plan will mesh with their next one, and it can be complicated.
- An HR department that can guide boomers through this complicated landscape can promote their physical wellbeing well past their last day of work.
- HR’s effort can have a positive effect on the company, too.
- An HR department that can guide boomers through this complicated landscape can promote their physical wellbeing well past their last day of work.
Boomers may not understand millennial culture or Gen Xers’ approach to parenting, but they do know how to conduct a career.
- Leaders can help boomers optimize healthy living long before they leave the company by teaching them this one valuable metric: “having enough energy to do the things you want to do each day.”
- As long as it ensures a health plan that allows boomers to execute what they love to do most every day and furthers their sense of purpose.
Boomers’ workplace loyalty and financial insecurity might influence your succession planning
Big Idea / Hint from Alysia:
- Train your managers to coach boomers with compassion for the individual and with care for the organization.
- Managers can amplify boomers’ sense of career wellbeing (and leverage their hard-won expertise) by asking them to serve as career mentors.
- Boomers may not understand millennial culture or Gen Xers’ approach to parenting, but they do know how to conduct a career.
Support Wellbeing Needs With Sensitivity to Improve Outcomes
Start with Wellbeing is a people-first paradigm that humanizes the workplace.
Though it serves a much bigger purpose than just reducing healthcare costs and risks, those costs can be substantial:
One small study at some Midwestern commercial laundry plants found that employees enrolled in their employer-sponsored health program increased their productivity by about 4% on average during the subsequent year — 10.8% among certain workers whose health improved between annual screenings — and the wellness program’s return on the laundry plant’s investment was 76.3%.
Wellbeing creates thriving lives and thriving employees. But only if leaders support it.
Big Idea / Hint from Alysia:
- Leaders who recognize that different generations have different wellbeing issues, support employee wellbeing in an especially sensitive way.
- That sensitivity and care increase the likelihood of successful wellbeing initiative outcomes — and the number of thriving employees.