CHRO
“What if the work itself is the problem for wellbeing?”
Work is changing faster than the way we look after employee wellbeing. In an interview with CHRO.nl, Arosha Brouwer, Chief Impact Officer at Colbe, raises an important question: what if the work itself is the problem?
According to Brouwer, the key question is no longer just how people are doing, but how the work itself is organised. “Every redesign of work is also a redesign of wellbeing, whether you take that into account or not,” she says. An organisation can have all kinds of wellbeing initiatives and still score poorly if its governance isn’t in order, too little attention is paid to how work is designed, or managers don’t receive enough support. What’s more, absenteeism is a late signal: by the time someone calls in sick, the problem has often been building for months.
The Colbe Work Wellbeing Capability Model helps organisations with this. It maps where an organisation stands on areas such as governance, data, leadership and work design, and what a logical next step would be. This makes work wellbeing not an HR issue, but a matter for the board.