Health – Promotion Leadership
More and more people are feeling ill and suffering from mental illness. In Sweden, mental illness cost more than 80 billion in 2018. According to the UN, mental illness will be the biggest disease in the world in 2030, if we do nothing about it. In addition, a good work environment also makes it easier to both retain and recruit new employees. In the end, doing a new recruitment costs a lot of money and time in each case.
Work environment work is often about preventing illness and accidents in the physical and psychosocial work environment. Working towards health promotion is a more offensive way of working. A health promoting leadership can be defined as a leadership that works to create a health promoting workplace culture, says Andrea Eriksson. Her dissertation was about both what a health promotion leadership entails and what conditions managers have in developing such leadership.
According to Eriksson, it is desirable that employees become involved in developing the workplace in such a health-promoting direction, she says. A health promotion leadership can be divided into two parts. Firstly, it is about the qualities that a manager has; that e.g. show consideration to their employees or inspire them to see the meaning of the work. Health promotion leadership is also about organizing work, conducting development work and having structures to follow up and evaluate the activities for which you are responsible. It is also about how to conduct systematic work environment work, says Eriksson.
While preventive work environment work focuses on warding off and protecting, health promotion work focuses on enabling. Those who choose to see health promotion leadership as part of their business strategy for creating a successful company / organization involves offensive work to promote and strengthen things that work well in an organization. By mapping and developing what is already good, you as a manager can relatively easily stimulate both well-being and achievement, thus creating a workplace where people want to be.
Companies make a business plan and in it they often define their business concept, goals and vision – and how the company should function in order for the business concept to be implemented. They add a business strategy to the business plan, which describes e.g. how the company should create profitability, what conceivable markets exist, what external conditions there are to take into account, more long-term goals and what resources it has to achieve its goals. The companies, which see health promotion work and leadership as a strategic issue from an organizational perspective, can create success through their work environment work. There is a strong connection between work environment and business development, people who are happy and feel good are simply performing better. To achieve this, health-promoting leadership and work must be clearly grounded in the corporate culture, in both vision and values. What values do you base your company/organization on? Do you follow it? You need to think long term and have a genuine interest in making your employees feel good and feel involved and involved in the business. How does the management team work with your visions, goals, strategies and values? Besides, what and how do you do to keep your employees healthy and not get sick?
Source: Eriksson, A. 2011. Health-Promoting Leadership: A Study of the Concept and Critical Conditions for Implementation and Evaluation
