Improve employee wellbeing to advance your bottom line: Gallup

• Higher life evaluations, wellbeing are positively associated with productivity, innovation, and safety

• 84 percent of MENA employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged

A Gallup report revealing the decline in employee well-being across the globe during the Covid-19 pandemic has called on organizations to address the issue for an improvement in their bottom line.

“When your employees’ wellbeing suffers, so does your organization’s bottom line,” a report on the Gallup website said. “Though business leaders can significantly affect all the elements of wellbeing for individuals and for teams in their organizations, the element they can have the most direct impact on is their employees’ career wellbeing”.

Gallup researchers have found that business leaders around the world can best support employees’ career wellbeing by coaching their strengths, connecting them to the organization’s mission and purpose, and focusing on employee engagement.

However, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2021 Report found that 84 percent of MENA employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged. “Embracing the untapped potential across the region in increasing engagement or focusing on individual career wellbeing is critical to meeting private and public-sector organizational outcomes across the region,” the report said.

Higher life evaluations and wellbeing are positively associated with productivity, innovation, and safety and reduce disengagement, shrinkage, and healthcare costs, the report added.

“Unemployment might be the only major life event from which people do not fully recover within five years,” said Jim Harter, Gallup Chief Scientist of workplace management and wellbeing practices and coauthor of Wellbeing at Work. “That means unemployment can take a greater personal toll than marriage, divorce, the birth of a child, or the death of a spouse”.

The report added that  “faster leaders boost employee engagement and wellbeing, the faster they will create a more prosperous future for the region’s workers and businesses”.