How Leaders Can Be More Inclusive Around Employee Healthcare And Well-Being
We often use the term inclusion in our diversity training in the context of our workplaces and ensuring individual voices are heard and respected. There are many relevant adages, such as, “If you aren’t actively including, you are probably accidentally excluding.” Personally, I have said diversity is counting the numbers; inclusion is about making the numbers count.
As we look around the world today, inclusion still seems elusive. For example, according to the World Economic Forum, the gender gap has increased to the largest in our lifetime, from 100 years to 132 years: “At the current rates of progress, it will take 155 years to close the Political Empowerment gender gap [and] 151 years for the Economic Participation and Opportunity gender gap.”
The pandemic impacted women and marginalized groups in unprecedented ways, with 54 million women leaving the workforce, and shone a light on inequities that exist in many systems we rely on—including healthcare, which I’ll be focusing on here because working when sick is more harmful than taking time off. The costs to business are well documented. It has been estimated that presenteeism costs U.S. firms $226 billion a year. As a senior leader of large and complex teams and someone who coaches clients in several sectors, including healthcare, on inclusion, burnout and reintegration into the workplace, I know that rethinking our perspectives matters.
With Covid-19, we witnessed the inability of healthcare systems to manage the sheer volume of cases globally. We saw other pressing healthcare issues sidelined. For example, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) reported that “almost 560,000 fewer surgeries were performed over the first 16 months of the pandemic compared with 2019.”
And healthcare became inaccessible to some of the most vulnerable: the elderly, those with limited resources, people living alone or in remote areas, persons with disabilities, those from ethnic or linguistic minorities and other marginalized communities. Many of these groups often have difficulty learning new skills and adopting new tech and solutions, due to a lack of resources or physical ability. This excludes them from the range of benefits that technology provides and leaves them isolated from the world around them, as McKinsey reports. Certainly, if an individual has the resources to access healthcare, then yes, telehealth is an option, but if you have language issues, you cannot afford Wi-Fi or you have a disability, then access to healthcare and other things most of us take for granted are not inclusive.
When we think of inclusion within these systems that are fundamental to the fabric of our society, arguably, they are intrinsic and simple human rights and needs.
What can leaders do to support the well-being of their team and ensure inclusion in the most effective way?
First, leaders can be more inclusive in their daily advocacy to include policy work and even partner with local agencies to ensure their staff and colleagues are getting the support they need.
Additionally, what if the healthcare options that employers provided evolved to include new innovations and technology that allowed for proactive prevention, informed diagnosis and collaboration between our circles of care? This would mean each of us would have greater understanding of and control over our health, who is involved in our care and who we share access and data with so we can manage our well-being. Individuals need to actively participate in their healthcare journey and data management and share that with their circle of care, be it a parent, partner or close friend, if they so choose, so they are well cared for. As they say and as we know, it takes a village.
How different people’s lives could be if we were to reframe inclusion as access and equity through a lens of prevention of barriers in spaces like healthcare, in addition to things like feeling safe at work or walking around in your neighborhood and knowing you will be cared for.
If leaders rethought what they provided in terms of healthcare models to be preventative rather than reactive and leveraged new innovations and products instead of waiting for employees to feel burned out, exhausted, sick or ready for the Great Resignation, how might that change retention, performance, happiness and their bottom line?
According to Accenture, “93% of U.S. healthcare executives believe that health equity initiatives are important and 89% agree that such initiatives are part of their core business strategy. Applying new thinking in the metaverse must include tackling top health equity priorities such as reducing health outcome disparities among patient populations, understanding social determinants of health, and improving the attitude, behavior, biases, and approach of providers and support staff.” These needs are priorities not only for leaders but for everyone. As someone who leads the diversity, equity and inclusion practice at my company, I work daily helping people understand, mitigate and break down biases and barriers in an effective way.
This simply means how we lead, how we work together and how we reintegrate into our workplaces matters. In our daily work environment, be it in person or remote, this may mean ensuring we stay connected to colleagues through various modes of communication, developing our organizational culture, remaining consistent, being collaborative and, of course, developing belonging through inclusion and our sense of community.
As leaders, let’s not minimize the accessibility—when you reintegrate people back to work, how are your spaces designed, and are you considering the impact on team-building and collaboration? What about respecting cultural nuances? One client shared with me that during the pandemic they grew such that they now have a number of new people from different countries and cultures, meaning they needed to rethink how they communicated, time zones and simple cultural nuances that they didn’t even know existed and were creating tensions. Building connectedness and ensuring belonging as part of the team’s whole health took on a new meaning for them.
So, we must ask ourselves at this intersection: Is inclusion a seat at the table and having our voices heard, or is it forming a deeper connection, understanding and ability to resolve issues no matter who you are and where you are because you matter in the universe? I would argue the latter.
Article link- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2022/08/26/how-leaders-can-be-more-inclusive-around-employee-healthcare-and-well-being/?sh=337d9d564a37