Not so long ago, a typical HR manager could turn up to work facing tough, but not insurmountable, challenges. There would be firefighting, but also some space for planning. A real staffing crisis was rare enough to be memorable.
Today, for many who work in HR, that time is starting to look like the glory days. Over the last two years, HR staff have been bludgeoned by the worst pandemic in a century, adapting to remote working, government work policies that change with the wind, acute recruitment shortages, demands for hybrid working, and exploding levels of workplace stress. Did we miss anything out? Oh yes, there was that Brexit thing.
No wonder HR Managers are feeling like squeezed-out tubes of toothpaste. In fact, 90% of HR workers are reporting higher levels of stress, and stress-related absence in HR staff were up by 70% in 2020.
For workforces (and for HR managers themselves), wellbeing has swiftly changed from a wouldn’t-that-be-nice optional extra to a fundamental workplace need. Without some sort of comprehensive wellbeing plan, organisations either quietly implode or can no longer attract the best talent.
Hear that? It’s HR’s irony meter exploding.
Often that’s putting HR staff in a classic bind: they are tasked with delivering a better wellbeing plan, but given that their organisation’s finances are stretched, there is no increased budget to pay for it. For example, a 2021 CIPD survey found that only 26% of UK organisations surveyed had increased health and wellbeing budgets in response to COVID.
All this means that up and down the UK, delivering better wellbeing programmes is a significant source of stress for HR managers. If you listen carefully, you can hear the irony meters exploding.
To escape this dilemma, there’s an urgent need for new ways of addressing wellbeing, methods which provide ongoing wellbeing support without traditional consultancy costs. What’s needed are services which can meet the needs of budget-constrained small teams, but which scale to larger ones as required. And because HR managers need to justify their spending, any solution should demonstrate its return on investment.
It’s exactly this problem which the ART Health team has been tackling.
Omics to the rescue.
When it comes to finding innovative wellbeing solutions, we’re proud to say we’ve got form. After all, we developed a uniquely holistic data-gathering system to power our recommendations. And because there wasn’t any solution that did exactly what we wanted, we created that too.
ART Health is creating products that provide new ways to address wellbeing, now such a key part of the employee experience conversation. For the first time, we’re offering stand-alone access to Omics, our proprietary, industry-leading, performance and wellbeing app.
Like most good ideas, our new service is beautifully simple. Employees download our Omics app, which tracks cognitive performance, physical and mental wellbeing metrics, and provides additional insights into employee experience. With their permission, Omics securely reports the aggregated, fully anonymous data to HR or leaders. As a business, this means that you receive:
- Insights into the key factors that impact your teams’ wellbeing and performance.
- Objective and bespoke evidence, allowing you to optimise wellbeing decisions and strategies.
- Ongoing holistic measurement of employee wellbeing, experience and performance
- Overall workplace scores, identifying high-risk areas
- Recommendations for your people, your places, and your spaces.
As a wellbeing solution, it’s straightforward, it’s backed by the very best science, and it’s both time- and cost-efficient.
Still needed: the human element
Having said that, we’d never claim that our new service solves every wellbeing problem for every HR manager. It can’t compete with the sort of insight provided by our more in depth wellbeing services. And thankfully, it can’t make wellbeing decisions for you.
What it can do, however, is provide quality wellbeing information when and where you need it, without blowing the budget. And we think there are a lot of squeezed-out HR managers who need all the help they can get.
Intrigued? We hope so. Get in touch with the ART Health team today and we’ll talk you through the possibilities.
ART Health Solutions is a wellbeing consultancy, providing effective, science-based wellbeing recommendations. Our bespoke solutions are generated by gathering data directly from the organisation and its employees. For all enquiries, please contact our friendly team.
