Employee Wellbeing: How to Build a Culture of Connection Through Effective Communication

We hear much in the media about wellbeing at work. But what can Internal Communicators (IC) do to help?

How can their role and actions make a difference in this space? Wellbeing at work refers to the overall state of health, happiness, and satisfaction that employees experience in their workplace.

It encompasses the physical, mental, emotional, financial, and social aspects of a person’s life. It aims to create a supportive environment where employees can thrive, feel valued, and perform at their best.

Wellbeing at work is about more than just avoiding stress or burnout; it’s about cultivating a positive, meaningful, connected, and engaging experience for employees.

As highlighted by Poppulo earlier this year, the world’s largest study into workplace happiness and wellbeing found that the single biggest driver of employee wellbeing is people feeling a sense of belonging where they work.

Not only that, the study proved the enormous impact employee wellbeing has on productivity, profitability and employee recruitment and recruitment. The head of the research study, Oxford University’s Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, highlighted the crucial role employee communication has in forging essential connections in organizations and, consequently, employee happiness and wellbeing.

So, there’s much an IC professional can do to positively affect a sense of connection and support employee wellbeing. Here’s how.

Create Open Channels for Communication and Connection

Humans are hard-wired to be social, so despite the rise in remote and hybrid working, our connections to others are paramount to our overall well-being.

IC can ensure there’s a multitude of platforms available to ensure everyone has the opportunity to stay connected at work. They should not be overwhelmed but rather meet employees where they are. Channels and apps can help open up flows of communication, enable employees to share information and their own voice, and stay connected to their colleagues in real-time.

Channels enabling two-way communication, including pulse surveys, feedback forms, and question and answer sessions, are vital in this space, ensuring employee feedback, ideas, and sentiment are able to be shared. This helps employees feel heard and valued—massive contributors to overall well-being.

Communication That Connects is Communication That's Relevant

That might seem to state the obvious, but far too many organizations thoughtlessly push out information and communication to already overloaded employees that aren’t relevant to them or their jobs. This archaic, spray-and-pray approach to workplace communication, aimed at a generic everybody instead of a specific somebody, should have no place in any workplace today because turns employees off company communication rather than having them enthusiastic about tuning in. In other words, it’s the opposite of connection-focused workplace communication and leads to disengaged employees.

There was a time when this approach was understandable, if not acceptable: when organizations didn’t have access to the kind of technology that enabled them to create and distribute information tailored for different categories of employees in different parts of the company, across departments, States and continents. And even in different languages.

But that excuse doesn’t work anymore. With communications platforms like Poppulo, organizations can connect with employees at any time and wherever they work on the comms channel of their choice, whether it’s email, mobile app, digital signage, the company intranet, at any time and wherever in the world they work, on the comms channel of their choice, whether it’s through email, mobile app, digital signage, the company intranet or Teams.

This ability to reach every employee, whether they’re in head office, on the frontline, on the factory floor, or on the road–and to target and tailor the information so that it’s relevant for the person getting it—is a game-changer in breaking down any sense of isolation or not feeling connected to the company.

The important thing to remember here is that no single comms channel can achieve this, especially in large enterprise organizations with highly dispersed workforces. It’s only possible through a platform that can power omnichannel communications that enables two-way consumer-grade communication with every single employee wherever they are.

Build a Culture of Trust

Of course, open and honest two-way communication will only ever occur when the culture is underpinned by transparency and trust. IC can influence and lead the way in this arena, encouraging leaders to role model honesty and openness and ensuring any organizational messaging does the same.

Employees can sniff out spin like a dog can smell sausages from 100 meters away, so honesty and integrity in communications are integral to building a culture of connection. It’s also about keeping employees regularly informed and up-to-date on key company news, successes, challenges, and changes. This helps foster a sense of trust, security, understanding, and connection to the organization they are a part of.

Personalize and Humanize Wellbeing

It’s not enough for an organization to provide employees with well-being resources. Employees have to feel and believe that their wellbeing truly is an organizational priority through the actions, words, and behaviors of leaders and colleagues around them.

IC can bring this to life through the stories, communications, and conversations that they influence. Wellbeing narratives help give permission to employees to focus on their wellbeing and find a healthy balance in their lives.

Personal stories are relatable and humanize the real challenges and diversity of everyday struggles that other colleagues face. They destigmatize problems and foster a culture where it’s ok to seek support and to offer help. They help bond and connect people who face similar issues and help ensure nobody feels ashamed or alone.

Enable Leader-led Conversations 

People also feel connected to others when they share something in common, be that perspectives, values, or challenges, for example. And since organizational culture is hugely influenced by the behavior of the leadership, Internal Communication can use the power of effective communication to help build bonds and connections between leaders and employees to amplify the well-being agenda.

Getting leaders to share personal approaches to managing stress or overcoming health challenges sends a strong message of support for employee health. Having leader-led "Ask Me Anything" sessions or town halls where the conversation is about wellbeing helps encourage employees to open up, and take the action or seek the support they need for themselves.

The Time is Now!

The wellbeing-at-work agenda is far from being about providing and sharing resources. If only it was that simple! Its about having the ability and support to focus on your own wellbeing and enable the same in others.

Internal communication has a unique capability and opportunity to influence this space by shaping a culture of human connections that encourages and enables well-being for the greater good of every employee and the organization as a whole.

If we take this opportunity, what a legacy that will create in the world of work!