Just what is the wellness level of today’s corporate workforce? That all depends on who you ask.
Because while C-suite executives overwhelmingly believe their employees are feeling mentally healthy, professionally fostered, and personally satisfied and included, many workers themselves would beg to differ.
That’s according to the findings of the third annual Workplace Well-being report from Deloitte. The audit and tax consultancy firm collaborated with independent researchers Workplace Intelligence to survey 3,150 executives, managers and workers across four countries (with 57% of respondents from the U.S., and others from the U.K., Canada, and Australia) to check in on the state of human sustainability—which is the degree to which an organization values people and leaves them with greater health and well-being, stronger skills for employability, opportunities for advancement, and a heightened connection to purpose.
A whopping 82% of executives believe their company is advancing human sustainability in general—but only 56% of workers agree.
Other gulfs in understanding, according to the findings: Around 90% of executives believe working for their company has a positive effect on worker well-being, skills development, career advancement, inclusion and belonging, and their sense of purpose and meaning; only 60% of workers agree.
Further, executives appear to be mostly unaware when it comes to the health of their workforce: 84% believe their workers’ physical health is “excellent” or “good” and 78% believe their mental health is “excellent” or “good,” while only 68% of the workers themselves agree about the state of their physical health and 57% agree about their mental health.
Regarding their financial well-being, only 39% of workers said it was “excellent” or “good,” despite 73% of executives believing it was. The same disconnect was there regarding social well-being, with 78% of executives believing it was “excellent” or “good” for employees—while only 51% of workers agreed.
So, what’s going wrong—and how can it be fixed?
“Generally, leaders tend to be more optimistic about how their workers are doing” than they are in reality, Meade Dickerson, a master certified executive coach who is often hired to help turn leadership around from such disconnect, tells Fortune. When he does feedback interviews with employees at a company to gain a sense of how things are going, he’ll often hear about how leaders—typically those who are more task-oriented— are out of touch with what’s going on with their workers.
“When I give that feedback to the executive, it tends to catch them by surprise, and is usually an indicator as to why I am hired to coach them,” he says. “A lot of that work is focused on developing higher levels of emotional intelligence within the leader so that they can focus more on their workers and get their finger on the pulse of how they are doing.”
One chief technology officer Dickerson has been working with, for example, “has made huge progress in getting a better understanding of his workers by focusing on them as people and not just how much they can get out of them. As a result, this organization has had lower turnover in the last four years than they had since the company was founded nearly 20 years ago.”
Sometimes, he adds, the problem can be as simple as leaders not having regular one-on-one meetings with employees.
“When workers don’t feel as if they are valued, trusted, seen, and heard, they feel as if their company doesn’t care about them or their sustainability,” he says. “I find this creates the disconnect most often in the companies I work with.”
Another problem may be that the C-suite is relying solely on data and metrics to take the pulse of its workforce, says Jay Bhatt, managing director for the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions and its Health Equity Institute. But sometimes, by the time feedback is taken and analyzed, dissatisfaction is “bubbling for a while until it boils over,” he tells Fortune.
Bhatt, also a primary-care physician in a Chicago clinic who makes a point of asking patients how things at work are going, believes the best way for executives to improve communication channels is by “normalizing the conversation” around mental and emotional health at work.
“Being able to talk about it and create a space to express it, that it’s OK to say ‘it’s not OK.’ And also mentoring and support,” he adds. “We see that when organizations have human-centered commitments in place and their leader can be visible and transparent, that has a positive impact and helps a workforce be empowered.” Deloitte, for example, offers employees a $1,000 well-being benefit that can be used for a trainer, massage, or other wellness experiences. “It may not seem huge, but these are things that move the needle in a significant way,” he says.
Other solutions highlighted in the report include: focusing on metrics that actually measure mental, physical, emotional, and financial well-being; holding executive trainings; making public commitments to improve human sustainability in order to be held accountable; and tying executives’ compensation and bonuses to how well they achieve goals around worker well-being.
Finally, it could be helpful for employees to understand that leaders are not immune to struggling, either: At least four out of 10 workers, managers, and executives say they “always” or “often” feel exhausted or stressed, according to Deloitte’s findings—with 59% of workers, 66% of managers, and 71% of the C-suite saying they’d seriously consider taking a job with another company that would support their well-being.
