Lesson Learnt:
Drive Well-being to Avoid Burnout

We had two guests this time, Dóra Szász, HR Manager, BAT Hungary and Iryna Bryzhak, HR Director, Metro Cash & Carry Ukraine. This time we summarize Iryna’s main thoughts shared with the fellow HR Heads.

Care to Dare as an answer to unstable engagement

When Iryna joined the company she saw that even though the Employee Experience Index (EEI) was pretty high, all other human related KPIs were not satisfactory, especially the attrition rate.
Iryna started to look for solutions. She discovered that the different combination of well-being level and engagement level will result in different QUALITY OF ENGAGEMENT. It was an answer to the riddle – low level of well-being with high level of engagement leads to stress, burnout and high attrition. This engagement is therefore unstable.

This realisation was one of the key reasons for Metro Cash & Carry to start to implement the strategy called “Care to Dare” – to get great results, to DARE to reach higher, you need first to take CARE of yourself and your people.

Benefiting from four years of efforts

Well-being covers 3 areas – Physical, Mental and Social Health. It is an overwhelmingly complex area to influence. The improvement required dramatic change in culture, processes and initiatives in the company. The HR team invested more than 4 years in this project. But exactly when the lockdown started, they saw huge benefits of this approach and culture.

Health and well-being of people at all levels became priority number one, providing financial support and safety to employees, hotline of psychological support, managerial activities, and online training. With the help of DEVELOR they developed skills of internal trainers to transfer offline training sessions into a virtual environment. Thanks to that they were able to provide people with knowledge and skills to support their health.

At the end of the story, Iryna’s team evaluated all main KPIs again and saw that even though they managed to keep the EE index on a very high level, they managed to decrease the attrition rate dramatically, as well as all other HR related KPIs, which looked absolutely fantastic.

EE index alone is not enough

This case presented at our international HR webinar teaches us that for generating long term business results and productivity of people it is crucially important to evaluate engagement with a FULL SET OF KPIs. An isolated EE index does not paint sufficient picture to assess the situation. 
There is a high correlation between employee engagement, attrition and well-being of people. And although a high level of EEI with a low level of well-being generates high results on a short run, it also means a high level of burnouts and attrition rate.
To build sustainable engagement, the people initiatives must also closely cover well-being in all three areas – Physical, Mental and Social Health. We as HR professionals and training providers can support it with routines and online training.

Stay in the conversation

In the second lesson learnt we share learnings from Dora Szazs of BAT about Going hybrid in a smart way. You can find it here.
Also – register yourself or notify your HR head to check out the third International RE/Think HR Webinar here.