Set your people up for sustainable success
Pam Loch, founder of people-focused Loch Associates Group — and this summer’s LPM conference co-chair — says firm leaders must inspire and empower their managers as the lynchpin of truly transformational wellbeing at work
Increased hours, heavy workloads, tight deadlines, information overload, stretched resources and skills gaps are often combined and create the environment in which employees in law firms are expected to operate. It can become a cauldron which is bubbling away to create a toxic potion of stressed employees and absences due to anxiety, depression or other physical ill health caused by stress.
While some employers will have wellbeing policies and organise social events, they are often only paying lip service to looking after their people’s wellbeing — trying to do the minimum to comply with their legal obligation to look after the health and safety of their employees.
A 2024 Wellbeing at Work survey from Deloitte highlighted this disconnect, with 90% of executives believing their organisation contributed to their employees’ wellbeing. Only 60% of the employees themselves agreed. The survey also found only 43% of workers agreed that their employer had contributed to their wellbeing and left them feeling better than when they had started.
So, what is a genuine wellbeing commitment? What does it look like and what is the business impact?
Cyclical benefits
Wellbeing is a whole person concept, not centred simply on physical health, but considering mental, social and emotional states, and how each of these energies interact and engage with one another. Embracing the whole person will create a cycle where thriving humans will enhance and improve organisations — and those performing organisations can feed back into the employee.
The starting point for this transformation sits in the laps of the organisation’s leaders, who should have a deep understanding and belief in people-focused wellbeing to create authentic engagement. This top-level buy-in feeds down into the managers. Managers are the lynchpin of genuine wellbeing in the workplace because the approach needs to be tailored to each individual. Empowering and training managers to create these tailored, meaningful wellbeing touchpoints will enable a workforce to thrive and excel.
Appropriate monitoring and evaluation of wellbeing is another key step in closing the disconnect gap. Creating metrics that report on an organisation’s performance, and then linking these to an annual bonus scheme, will not only demonstrate the commitment to employee-led wellbeing but motivate managers to put their people first. Tracking sickness, turnover and engagement rates, creating feedback systems, surveys and assessments to consider the mental and physical health of your teams, and then being transparent with this data, will help to create a culture of trust and belonging. Having trained mental health champions and first aiders sitting outside HR will also have a positive impact on wellbeing.
Support for human sustainability
Positively impacting an employee’s work wellbeing will inevitably impact their wider lives, creating a ripple effect across communities and societies. This then creates, as Deloitte campaigns for, organisations that focus on human sustainability — helping people to be better, stronger and well-equipped employees.
The future of wellbeing in the workplace needs to fundamentally shift away from being a tick-boxing exercise. The perspective change needs to move from considering and using it as a wellness plaster, with a list of tactical tools that can be employed by an organisation. The tide needs to turn so that it is ingrained in the fabric of the organisation — lived, breathed and then embodied by employees, managers and leaders alike. Only at this point, when wellbeing becomes about the whole person’s life ambitions, rather than the business ambitions, will teams, their leaders and the business truly align to transform it from the inside out.
