Why this business gives employees ‘healthies’ to help reduce ‘sickies’

Taking a ‘sickie’ has always been something of a rite of passage for workers in Australia. 

Back in September 2020, the team here at FutureBrand started doing something different and we took our first ‘healthie’. 

It’s like a sickie, only better, quite literally. 

It’s a day off work, once every quarter, to do something – or nothing! – whatever you fancy, no questions asked. And we all take a ‘healthie’ on the same day so that we all get to enjoy the benefits, together. 

It’s always been one of my favourite initiatives for illustrating how we’ve transformed our own employee experience. 

And it’s on my mind for a couple of reasons. 

Firstly, because just last week we all took our latest ‘healthie’. 

(I played golf, again.) 

Secondly, because just this week I’ve had a couple of business leaders talk to me about their own employee experience, whether it’s how they use the brand internally to attract, engage and grow their employees or indeed how employees use the brand externally to attract, engage and grow their customers. 

Naturally, one leads to the other – it’s why we measure both our client NPS (Net Promoter Score) and our team NPS – and one of my favourite statistics is this via the Harvard Business Review: 

“Employee engagement explains two-thirds of our client experience scores. And if we’re able to increase client satisfaction by five points, we see an extra 20% in revenue on average, so clearly there’s an impact.” – head of HR, IBM 

Happy clients? Healthie team. 

But that’s just the start.

Your employee experience cannot be a one-off initiative, nor can it only operate at the surface level, it has to live deeper than that. 

In a post-pandemic world where we’re all now enjoying flexible working arrangements, companies can no longer rely on the culture to come exclusively from physical environments and ‘extracurricular’ activities. For all of us now, a company’s culture has to come through the work, not the walls, and so the pivotal interplay between the employee experience and the customer experience is now more closely intertwined than ever. 

In practical terms, the future of work means companies can no longer afford to treat their employees as poor cousins to their customers. That’s not to reject the assertion by renowned business thinker, Peter Drucker, that the purpose of a company is ‘to create and keep a customer’, it’s simply to highlight the fact that companies are equally aimless if they don’t have productive employees, let alone profitable customers. 

Ultimately, the stark reality is that so much of the typical employee experience is characterised by the catch-all backstop that is a company’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP). If the culture is poor, if people are facing burnout, if the working environment is unhealthy, companies point their people in the direction of the EAP, but by then it’s often too late. 

What ‘healthies’ signal – and demonstrate – is a proactive approach to the employee experience that prioritises employee wellbeing and therefore employee performance. 

It’s this proactivity that’s the platform for supporting the growth of your employees and, in turn, the growth of your company. 

Even before they become your employees, it starts with how you recruit. It continues with how you onboard them. 

It lives and breathes in your company’s habits and rituals – ‘the way we do things around here’. 

In fact, it’s in all the interactions and initiatives that happen before it turns into a sickie, or worse. 

The future of work is here, it’s time for us all to be a little healthier.

Rich Curtis is the CEO of FutureBrand Australia.