Staff wellbeing: ‘The important thing is how people work, not where they work’

“What the last two years have demonstrated is that there is no longer a clear roadmap, and every organisation must spend time understanding the needs of their workforce in a way they never had to do before.” These are the words of Lisa Stevens, an industry veteran of 30 years and now the global chief people officer and head of human capital solutions at professional services firm Aon.

“The more agile and flexible organisations are, the better they’ll be at winning the war for talent,” she says.

Aon employs 50,000 people across 120 countries, including more than 700 in Ireland. Stevens believes a holistic approach to employee wellbeing, which covers people’s emotional, physical and financial health, will play a critical role in helping organisations keep on top of their personnel needs in the future.

One of Stevens’s first actions when she joined Aon last year was to appoint a chief wellbeing officer to signal that wellbeing was no longer just an HR issue but something that everyone with a leadership role within Aon should have a vested interest in supporting.

“Traditionally, clients came first and that can’t be the case any more,” she says. “The workforce needs to come first or at least there has to be a better balance between client needs and workforce needs.”