This new resource Healthy People, Healthy Business: Embedding a culture of employee health and wellbeing was developed in collaboration with more than 20 WBCSD member companies. It identifies key levers for businesses to maximize positive impacts across various dimensions of health and wellbeing for the individuals that sit at the heart of business operations. It provides a practical framework with tangible examples showing how businesses can accelerate efforts to embed employee wellbeing into organizational strategy.
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a sharp reminder of the critical importance of health and wellbeing as the bedrock for prosperous societies and economies around the world. It has also prompted much reflection on what can be done to promote and protect health more robustly and equitably moving forward, putting us on course to realize many of the ambitions laid out in Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Wellbeing.
Against this backdrop, WBCSD launched the Healthy People, Healthy Business project in April 2021, which helps member companies follow the Health & Wellbeing Pathway laid out in WBCSD’s Vision 2050: Time to Transform. The project builds a cross-sectoral coalition of WBCSD members to identify private sector opportunities to drive health promotion and disease prevention, thereby transforming the health and wellbeing value chain as set out in WBCSD’s 2022-2027 Strategy.
The new guidance represents a first output from this coalition, and focuses on workplace wellbeing. It outlines the business case for realizing a culture of health and wellbeing and provides a maturity matrix as a practical tool for companies to assess at what stage of the journey they are to embedding a culture of health and wellbeing into their organizational make-up. The report then provides priority actions to enhance maturity, and outlines a five-step process for companies to realize these actions and progress in their health and wellbeing journey. The steps include to:
- Diagnose maturity
- Strategize to drive change
- Customize the approach
- Implement the right levers to drive change
- Evaluate and communicate performance