Highlights
- Employee ill-health has been reported to have a deep impact on the bottom lines of modern businesses.
- This is why enterprises are rolling out wellness initiatives to improve employee health outcomes.
- AI plays a significant role in this wellness revolution, beyond the usual nudge tech and data-based well-being initiatives. Read on for more.
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$530 billion
According to the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, $530 billion is what ill-health costs US employers in productivity losses each year. That’s nearly equivalent to the entire nominal GDP of the United Arab Emirates. Or pop singer Taylor Swift’s current net worth, times 500. Or the current market value of LVMH, the holding company for luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton.
With good health accounting for such an outsized impact on the bottom line, it is not surprising, then, that businesses are increasingly turning their focus to employee well-being and are implementing targeted initiatives in a bid to improve the overall health outcomes of their workforces. And thanks to the detrimental effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on both the physical and mental health of the modern workforce, employers have their work cut out for them.
Happy people → successful businesses
Speaking at the Top Employers Connect India 2023 event held at TCS Siruseri, Chennai, Adrian Seligman, Chief Commercial Officer, Top Employers Institute, contextualized the role of the emotional well-being of employees in the Indian scenario. “A joint report by Indeed and Forrester shows that more than three-fourths of workers in Indian businesses report low levels of well-being. Our research demonstrates that investing in well-being programs can not just improve employee engagement but also bolster employee perception of the organization, which independent research by Gallup shows as having dipped in recent times,” he said.
Designing holistic wellness strategies
Pointing out some key takeaways about wellness data gleaned from the over 2,200 organizations currently certified by the Top Employers Institute, Seligman explained that a holistic well-being strategy would be both employee-centric and business-relevant and would focus on defined objectives and outcomes.
“It should address not just the financial, environmental, occupational, and physical aspects of an employee’s life, but also the emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual.” Apart from increasing the quantity and scope of wellness practices, employers can also improve employee engagement by making well-being a material aspect of performance conversations.
At Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), employee well-being is embedded right into the fabric of the organization. Holistic well-being programs within TCS promote a healthier lifestyle, offer work-life balance, and take into account the emotional health of the workforce. These employee wellness programs span the gamut of health offerings, right from nudge tech that helps associates stay active to one-on-one online counseling sessions for better mental health.
AI’s role in people management
AI-led technological interventions in HR are not limited to nudge tech and data-based wellness initiatives alone, though. At the Top Employers Institute event, Sathya Mehta, Head, Talent Transformation and Global Policies, TCS, spoke about how businesses are tapping into scalable digital assets and value builders to offer HR as a service and digital transformation framework.
On offer is the ability to attract and retain the right talent, monitor health, safety, and wellness, optimize HR costs, create a future-ready workforce, and improve the overall employee experience. One such offering under the TCS Cognix™ umbrella is a CV screener that accelerates the time to hire. It uses AI to understand job descriptions and parse CVs in order to generate the best matches. This tool can also help businesses identify skill gaps in the market.
TCS Cognix is a culmination of years of AI investments by TCS to create a cutting-edge suite of HR products and platforms. With the ambient intelligence enabled by AI and tons of relevant data, TCS can anticipate challenges the industry might face and deliver solutions to customers before they can even formulate problem statements.
In practice, this ranges from helping a US-based firm improve employee experience and fixing payroll and employee satisfaction challenges for a UK-based business to helping a large Mexican cement manufacturer resolve low plant productivity and long lead time in hiring. TCS Cognix provided the vital intelligence layer in all these instances.
The Top Employers Connect India 2023 event at TCS Siruseri, Chennai, culminated with a live exploration of some of the pressing issues in the HR space through a design thinking workshop led by TCS.
