Our expectations and understanding of wellbeing have changed drastically in the last few years, and conversations on the topic quickly spin off into other critical areas ranging from employee experience to productivity to HR strategy.

In a recent conversation with Isabel Naidoo, Chief People Officer of Wise, People Matters got the opportunity to ask her about some of the ramifications of wellbeing in the workplace. Isabel joined Wise as Chief People Officer in 2022, with a strong background in consulting and financial services, and a particular passion for data and analytics, DEI, and the future of work. Here's what we heard from her.

Key takeaways:

• People expect employers to pay much more attention to their wellbeing today
• Wellbeing and productivity are intuitively connected

We've come a long way with our concept of wellbeing in the workplace. How do you see this shift?

I think the expectation that people have of their employers has changed dramatically. When somebody came into the workplace many years ago, it was quite a contractual relationship: you're employed to work from nine to five, do your job, and go home. That's changed and evolved, and so have expectations of what an employer should do. Then the pandemic came along, and even in traditionally more conservative populations like the US, for example, where employers would never ask about your health publicly, suddenly the expectation was that an employer would take responsibility for an employee's wellbeing. I think that's led to more dialogue around wellbeing, and a greater prevalence of people talking about wellbeing from an employer's perspective.

We're talking a lot about productivity these days. Do you think there's a correlation between productivity and wellbeing?

I think productivity is like the Holy Grail at the moment, especially in the context of return to office. And I would instinctively say that there absolutely is a correlation. We all know we do our best work when we're rested and feeling well, and not facing challenges to our wellbeing whether social, financial, emotional, or physical. Intuitively, there is a link. But I'm a data woman, and I haven't got the data to prove it.

But if an organisation wanted to deal with burnout and its effects on productivity, I absolutely would encourage them to focus on wellbeing and working practices. We often forget that how you work can actually impact your output very much. Just working hard doesn't make your output better, but working smart generally will. Here at Wise, for example, we encourage our people to come together on a regular basis. We support quarterly planning cycles, we make sure everyone is really clear about our stated goals and has clarity about the purpose and the mission that they're going towards. We're really focused on how people work and what we need to do to enable that. And I think that really does have an impact.

Key takeaways:

• To add value, HR must understand the business
• Data is your best friend in a HR role

Interconnections like that one between productivity and wellbeing imply that HR really needs to follow the business strategy very closely. But who needs to lead – HR following business, or business asking HR questions?

I'd love to live in a world where the business people are asking HR questions! But realistically speaking, for a HR organisation to add value we need to understand the business, and be really clear about what we're doing to enable the business.

In Wise, for example, we have a three pronged strategy. We talk about building skills that are needed for the future: that's to enable growth in the business. Then we want to build an irresistible employee experience, because we know that's going to enhance the customer experience. And the third thing is to ensure that we have optimised our ways of working because that's going to directly affect speed to market.

When you have that clarity around planning, you can talk about less tangible items like skills and experience and ways of working and have them very tightly linked to business outcomes. And I think that's how everyone should think of their people plans. It's not business or HR as two separate thing: it's how they're tied.

Any tips on how to create that tight link?

In an HR role, data is your best friend. If you walk in and say you want to roll out all these new talent initiatives because you think it sounds good, you'd be dead in the water. But if you use the data to identify the places where the challenges are, like where are we seeing high attrition, where are we trying to open a new market, where have we struggled to hire – being able to use the data to choose wisely is really important.

And if you don't have a good data analytics function, then make finance your best friend. They have as much data as you do, and they are probably far more experienced in using it to find the pain points.