Associate Fellow Henrietta Jowitt on well-being within business and performance
Associate Fellow Henrietta Jowitt has written a new paper for MindForward Alliance arguing that ‘mental health and well-being of employees should form the measurable foundation of the ‘S’ within Environment, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) strategy.’
The paper is part of a body of work underway in the context that employee well-being has rapidly risen on the business agenda.
Assessing the impact of the pandemic, Henrietta writes that,
‘Managers and leaders have realised that the mental well-being of their staff and indeed themselves, has a direct and visible impact on productivity and performance.’
She describes well-being as too often conceptually in the wrong place by being placed with the Health and Safety agenda. ‘Well-being of colleagues is an output, not an input. H&S is a set of inputs. The tasks and activities associated with H&S are important but are a small subset of other levers and activities that need to be in place to deliver well-being overall for employees.’
Henrietta worked with a number of thought leaders, including Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. His work is complimentary to this paper and forms part of what Henrietta considers a three-legged stool: the proposition that this paper addresses describing what wellbeing is and why it is important, then how you measure it in business and correlate it to overall business performance, and then how you build a strategy and a plan to deliver it within an organisation.
Henrietta plans to build on her work in this area in the future to provide more detailed operational initiatives for a business to develop their well-being levers and plans and highlight best practice.
Henrietta Jowitt is an Associate Fellow and member of the Principal’s Circle at Green Templeton. She is an alumna of then-Templeton College and a senior business leader with more than 20 years’ experience in driving growth and transformation. She was Deputy Director General (Commercial) of the Confederation of British Industry from 2016 to 2021.
MindForward Alliance a leading global not-for-profit membership organisation transforming workplace culture into one that supports the mental health of its employees. Using best practices from around the globe, they offer a range of tools and services to support businesses create mentally healthy workplaces.
