Why Brands Should Care about Employee Wellbeing

A Letter from Our Partner, Humanity Agency, on the Human Pursuit of Wellbeing

You may have read about the Wellbeing at Work Report, written by

Humanity and Sidekick. In the report, we explored wellbeing in the

workplace and how it can be improved by providing a deeper

understanding of the relationship between work and people. The insights

pulled from the report intend to provide a starting point for leaders and

teams to build thriving workplaces and businesses through the

enhancement of the human pursuit of wellbeing.

As we were developing the report, VP, Head of Strategy for Humanity,

Ryan Hughes wrote an open letter dedicated to the reader. This letter

didn’t make it to the final version of the report, but we share it with you

here and now, and hope it provides some insight into what drove us on this

journey to understand employee wellbeing, and why it’s so important for

brands to do the same.

An Open Letter - Hello from Humanity

Over the past two years, all of us have come together to face a global pandemic that caused a massive shift in the way we think, work, and collaborate. Depending on the industry, remote work either presented itself as a viable solution to our problems or an impossible one. More than ever before, people have been discussing their mental health struggles, productivity, and financial situations to determine whether this abrupt change was for better or for worse. Naturally, the

data shows that the “right answer” varies from person to person, workplace to workplace.

In the advertising industry, metrics are important. Brands practically eat, sleep, and breathe consumer data but for us, uncovering the human connection behind those metrics has always been our goal. Most importantly, as brand strategists and advertisers, we look to perceive employees as a core part of a brand’s community. Marketing your brand to your employees is equally important as

marketing your brand to your audience—after all, how can we expect a brand to be loved if employees don’t love it first?

Lately, we’ve been curious about things like — Why do we work? What does work mean to us? How does work contribute to our universal pursuit of wellbeing? And why are we seeing the signs of a fundamental shift in our relationship with work as we usher in a new Human Age? It’s in this spirit that we’ve approached our first Wellbeing at Work Report, published in collaboration with Sidekick Consulting to bring a human lens to our questions.

By using our proprietary Wellbeing FrameworkTM, we’ve looked across many forms of diversity and have attempted to understand differences in the lived experiences as granularly as our data can allow. In the future, we aim to fully understand the wellbeing at work for racialized Canadians and those identifying with other forms of diversity through further studies as a part of our overarching Wellbeing Project.

Until then, we hope you’ll join us in our first conversation about how we can achieve

a better sense of wellbeing in the workplace.

Ryan Hughes

VP, Head of Strategy

Humanity

Read it for yourself, download the Wellbeing at Work Report now.