Prioritising wellbeing | Supporting your people is crucial to surviving the recession

By Ravi Punn, Employee Benefits Consultant

Nearly everything in your business can be duplicated - products, infrastructure, services - but what about your people?

When we think about what really drives a business forward, it’s not the lifeless elements. These things are important, but it’s the human aspects, the intellectual capital within an organisation, that will make the difference to how well your organisation weathers financial turbulence.

Enacting positive change and prioritising wellbeing

The focus during a recession needs to be about being agile, and open to change, rather than rigid and inflexible. Recessions affect all aspects of a business, but if managed correctly from an HR perspective, it can be an opportunity to enact positive change in the long run. If we look, for example, at the change bought about by the pandemic, we can see that a mental shift took place - moving away from the rigidity of working within a fixed location, and rarely checking in on employees, to a largely dynamic, hybrid working environment. The themes of burn out and cognitive overload underpinned our response to the pandemic, where we began to realise the impact a business can have on the wellbeing of its workforce, and we noticed that the organisations who prioritised the wellbeing of their workforce came out of the pandemic stronger, with a renewed resolve to working.