A pulse on total well-being at work 

Employers worldwide are digging in like never before to learn what experiences employees want from their careers, their workplaces and how these intertwine with their lives. This is precisely the input they need to create thriving, healthy, energized workforces.

To help business leaders and people managers get a pulse on total well-being at work, we asked 135 employers from around the world to assess their efforts in supporting employees physically, mentally, financially, and socially¹.

Total well-being at work combines employees' best health, happiness, financial stability, and purposeful career to create compelling employee experiences. Such experiences are aligned with effective reward and people programs – such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social and governance (ESG) – and are supported by state-of-the-art technology.

We learned that what people want from work has stayed the same, but how they want to engage with work has changed. Historically, organizations focused on retaining and motivating employees by meeting their basic pay, benefits and psychological needs. But today's successful employers are concentrated on a Thrive Contract that meets employees' well-being needs as they relate to purpose, equity and impact. The employer/employee contractual continuum is expanding towards a Lifestyle Contract that embraces employees' choices, connections, and contributions for personal fulfillment.

What people want from work fundamentally has not changed but how they want to engage with work has.

The Thrive Contract largely replaced the more unidimensional Engagement Contract, which dominated the 2000s focused on achievements, camaraderie, and providing meaning in work. The emerging Lifestyle Contract embraces the intertwining of work and life so employees can enter authentic dialogues about what they want from their employment arrangements. For example, our Global Talent Trends survey found that one in three employees would forgo a pay raise for additional well-being benefits for themselves or their families and additional flexibility at work. And more than three in five employees will only join or stay with a company if they can work remotely/hybrid, forcing employers to reimagine new work contracts and reframe work-life integration.²

The organizations in our survey reported on their progress with the four pillars of well-being.

Our research took a deep dive into the tech vertical market³ and discovered the following:

• Strengths and opportunities for the technology sector are broadly aligned with insights across general industries. Technology sector employers are particularly strong in their focus on providing accessible and effective services for employees' mental health and well-being.
• While other industries are not yet as comfortable with financial well-being, approximately half of tech sector organizations indicate they have a financial well-being strategy in place, incorporating financial education and global minimum standards. Technology employers also showed more comfort with physical health and mental well-being strategies than employers in other sectors.
• The technology sector is more likely than the general industry to believe their employees have the flexible working options they need to thrive.
• The technology sector needs more support in developing and sharing effective impact metrics for well-being initiatives, which is a similar finding across all industries.

While employers have been actively implementing well-being programs, there is an opportunity to develop and enhance the needed impact metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of global well-being practices and be able to communicate results to stakeholders. Only 18% of employers said they had clear impact metrics in place, and another 18% did not know if they did.

The survey found that a slight majority (54%) of employers use behavioral nudges to ensure employees can effectively navigate and use their benefits. The efficient use of behavioral nudges is one of the most successful ways to optimize employee choices. This continues to be an opportunity to improve employee well-being outcomes.

As part of our ongoing work with the World Economic Forum, we created a framework of goals, metrics and targets to make Good Work a reality to help organizations attract and retain talent successfully. This involves facilitating a group of global, cross-industry, forward-thinking companies focused on building a resilient, equitable, inclusive, more just and human-centric future of work. One of the core goals of this collective is to safeguard total well-being at work. Specifically, this requires the broad goal of measuring the percentage of employees with access to lifestyle and financial well-being management programs, chronic disease support, and health insurance.

The Good Work Alliance recommends the following metrics to evaluate the progress toward more granular well-being goals. 

To elevate and improve total well-being at your place of work, we recommend the following five steps for the most significant immediate impact:

Take this brief survey to assess your company's approach to total well-being: the convergence of good health, happiness, financial stability, and a purposeful career.

• David Barker, Multinational Client Segment Principal
• Melody Kwan, Multinational Client Segment Principal
• Aiyanna Lund, Mercer Marsh Benefits Bid Management Leader
• Wolfgang Seidl, Ph.D., Workplace Health Consulting Leader
• Lin Shi, Multinational Client Segment Principal
• Yvonne Sonsino, Global Co-Leader Next State Partner
• Gareth Williams, Multinational Client Segment Principal

_{¹ Mercer’s Total Well-being diagnostic survey was conducted with 135 employers around the world, representing a broad range of industries. Forty-seven percent of the companies that participated had more than 10,000 employees. The survey was conducted by Mercer using an online survey tool between October 2022 and December 2022 with the report prepared 2023.}

_{² Global Talent Trends, 2023, Mercer}

_{³ Mercer’s Total Well-being diagnostic survey was conducted with 23 technology employers.}