Making Employee Wellbeing the Top Leadership Priority

By JIM PURCELL It starts with the CEO. Studies confirm that the single most important determinant of successful workplace wellbeing programs is the active, passionate, and persistent involvement of the CEO. The CEO is taken very seriously.  When the CEO wants something, people notice.  When the CEO is passionate about something, it gets elevated to extreme importance.  The sort of paradigm and cultural change needed to create a culture of employee wellbeing simply cannot occur without the full, passionate, focused, and persistent involvement of the CEO.  I was a CEO, and one has to have been one to understand the full implications of CEOship.  It IS different.  This is not elitism.  It’s fact. While I was CEO of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of RI, I made my singular focus ethics and integrity. Why? Because my predecessor became top-of-the-fold news, and our organization quickly gained a reputation for unethical behavior. We had to change that, and I made ethics and integrity part of every speech, virtually every piece of written material I sent to employees, a part of fully half of my weekly newsletters to employees, etc. And over time, it worked. No cutting corners; full compliance; a strong reporting system, etc. And we became recognized, rather quickly, for having ethics “in our DNA.” I wish I had brought the same passion to the wellbeing of my employees. I didn’t, and now part of my mission in life is correct that by inspiring CEOs, Boards, and C-Suites to ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Jim Purcell Source Type: blogs