Foster Employee Wellbeing

Racial Equity Tools

Racial Equity Tools has compiled a vast library of resources that will help you to understand and advance racial equity within your organisation. The library is arranged into four broad "themes," including fundamentals, such are core concepts, the history of racism and movements, data, and resources; planning that examines key issues, such as economic security and language justice; acting to find strategies and advocate for ending structural racism and advancing social change; and evaluating progress and results.

A Practical Toolkit to Help Employers Build an Inclusive Workforce

This toolkit from the Mental Health Commission of Canada is an excellent resource for creating an accommodating and inclusive workplace and addressing the needs of workers living with mental illness.

The toolkit is divided into five sections: an organisational self-assessment that will help you to identify what your organisation is doing well and where it can improve; an exploration of workplace strategies and resource for addressing key issues; case scenarios; a framework to help you assess your organisation's ROI and predict related costs; and practical tools that will help you to monitor, evaluate, and ensure ongoing improvement.

The toolkit will benefit HR professionals and employees tasks with wellness, diversity, and other sustainability-related responsibilities to improve recruitment and retention, and to support policies and practices that affect everyone.

WELL Building Standard

This research-informed resource from the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) will help you to create and support thoughtful and intentional spaces that enhance human health and well-being. WELL draws upon the expertise of medical professionals, public health experts, building scientists, and thousands of other practitioners and WELL users to advance the quality of life of workers. The standard addresses ten key concepts such as air, light, thermal comfort, movement, and materials in the workplace, and provides evidence-based recommendations for performance-testing and optimisation.

Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion

The Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) has created a range of reports, resources, and toolkits to help you with advancing equity and challenging racism in the workplace. These resources include leadership and workplace guides that focus on creating inclusive and safe spaces, as well as step-by-step toolkits that explain how to navigate race in the workplace and develop a diversity and inclusion strategy. Although much of the CCDI's content is written from a Canadian context, most of their insights and lessons are universally relevant.

White Supremacy Culture

White supremacy culture can manifest in subtle ways within the workplace, such as through perfectionism, defensiveness, paternalism, and individualism. This primer will help you to understand and better identify problematic attitudes and behaviours, and to proactively build a more inclusive, collaborative, and supportive environment.

Why corporate well-being initiatives need to get personal

Urgent global issues such as wealth inequality, technological disruption, and diminished trust in institutions are forcing organizations to re-evaluate their business purpose and reconfigure their wellbeing initiatives. This article explores some simple ways to make your wellbeing strategy more employee-centric, such as by leading with purpose, upskilling employees to ensure future success, and using data and analytics to align benefit investments with what employees want and need.

How to run a company with (almost) no rules

Ricardo Semler puts forward some novel ideas around employee wellbeing in this TED Talk. Semler is the CEO of Semco Partners, one of the largest companies in Brazil. He is also the author of Maverick, Managing with People in Mind, and The Seven-day Weekend.

The Wellness Syndrome

Are corporate wellness programs making people worse? Researchers Andre Spicer and Carl Cederström explore how our current approaches to wellness may be resulting in guilt, reduced productivity, and a number of other outcomes that actually make us less healthy and more anxious. This will be an interesting read for practitioners involved in wellness programs at their organisations.

What’s the Hard Return on Employee Wellness Programs?

Historically, employee wellness programs have been viewed as an extra benefit to employees, rather than a strategic imperative to the business. But research suggests that the ROI on comprehensive, well-run employee wellness programs can be impressive. In this article, authors Berry, Mirabito, and Baun explain that the most successful wellness programs are supported by six essential pillars: engaged leadership at multiple levels; strategic alignment with the company’s identity and aspirations; a design that is broad in scope and high in relevance and quality; broad accessibility; internal and external partnerships; and effective communications.