Increasing Wellbeing in Organizations: The role of Managers and Leaders

If you lead or manage people, your actions have a direct impact on the wellbeing of others. When leaders embrace the opportunity to improve employees’ wellbeing, they create more engaging places to work and greater returns for the organization. And they even help strengthen their employees’ families. But when leaders opt to ignore employees’ wellbeing – dismissing it as something that’s “none of their business” -they erode the confidence of those who follow them and limit their organization’s ability to grow.

Over the past decade, Gallup has worked with hundreds of organizations to help their managers create engagement and boost the wellbeing of their employees. One of the best questions we have asked more than 15 million workers is whether their supervisor (or someone at work) seems to care about them as a person. Implicit in this question is the notion that an employee’s manager or supervisor cares about him as a whole person, not merely as an employee or as a means to an end. This question serves as a barometer of whether an employee feels as if his manager truly cares about his wellbeing. read more