Employee wellbeing is becoming more and more important to South African business. It's not just about boosting your ESG credentials for the sake of "looking good". Companies are increasingly realising that looking after your employee wellbeing is going to lower the costs of recruitment and high turnover, encourage loyalty and hard work, and make the organisation more productive and profitable overall. But what's the best way to go about it?That's the million Rand question. But we got some good answers in a recent online discussion, in which Jaco Oosthuizen, Co-Founder and Managing Director of YuLife South Africa, was joined by Natasha Pillay, Managing Executive for Charisma Healthcare Solutions, and Vinolia Singh, Chief People Officer at AdCorp. This fascinating session produced several valuable insights into improving employee wellbeing, and shared some useful and practical strategies for enhancing it in South African companies today. During the discussion, Jaco Oosthuizen outlined six important points about how to improve employee wellbeing. We summarise these insights below, and you can view the full video here. 1. Create the right cultureJaco emphasised that businesses can't wait for employee wellbeing to magically appear out of thin air. "Wellbeing starts with the culture you're creating and it needs to be driven from the top down," he explains. And that means taking it seriously and putting in real effort — not just paying lip service. "If the leadership doesn't buy in, and it remains a tick-box exercise, and you just have a Wellness Week every year or so, q it doesn't become part of your culture," he argues. "I think that's just a waste of time and money. "In my view, the leaders need to buy in and they need to lead by example. If I look at YuLife, all our founders live our values on a day-to-day basis and that permeates down through the company. So I think for me it's starting at the top, and then creating a culture where employees feel valued and cared for."What should that culture look like? "I think it's a culture where employees feel valued and cared for," Jaco says. "Because then they'll feel they belong there, and they'll give more than what they take. And that's one of our values at YuLife: give more than you take, and create a win-win."2. Be vulnerableJaco's next piece of advice may not be something you'd find in an old-school management book. But he's convinced that vulnerability in leaders is a key way to foster employee wellbeing. "Sometimes people think vulnerability is a weakness, but it's actually a big value that we have as a company," he says. "So every week the leaders of YuLife sit together, and we actually are vulnerable; opening ourselves up to honesty and saying what's actually happening in ourselves. And when you create that openness and transparency with other people around you, you then encourage your employees to do that as well."This starts with being vulnerable about your own challenges. "I never had mental health issues until I was attacked nine years ago," Jaco reveals. "That helped me understand mental health in a deep way. And as a company, we de-stigmatise mental health, because of the way that our leaders are vulnerable and open and talking about it." 3. Foster social connectionsBeing vulnerable is key to forging meaningful social connections among employees, and this is another key factor in encouraging wellbeing, says Jaco. "Social wellbeing is one of the biggest determinants of longevity: it's bigger than even eating healthily, for example," he notes. "And social connections at work can have a massively positive contribution to getting employees engaged with each other and their work."For Jaco, this starts with selecting the right people to work for you, to foster the culture that you wish to create. And if you succeed, it'll be obvious to all concerned. "At YuLife, for example, our T-shirts bear the slogan 'Love being Yu', and that's what we drive towards as a company: to create joy," he says. "Because I think wellness is partly about having a sense of belonging, and that people feel they're cared for by the employer. So it's not about just one aspect: it's looking holistically and how you make it a joyful place to work."4. Encourage face-to-face interactionsOf course, what all this means in practice is changing in the wake of the pandemic and the remote working patterns it instituted. But while some organisations are keen to get everyone back to the pre-2020 way of doing things, YuLife is taking a more hybrid and flexible approach. "Right now, we are about 250 people working from 15 countries, and we've fully adopted 'the internet is our office'," he explains. "But we're slowly getting back into more face-to-face interactions. "We make a point of it to get everyone together at least on an annual basis, which we call the Festival of Yu," he continues. "We also have a lot of weekly rituals. For example, every Monday morning we start the week with a gong session. Our CEO Sammy Rubin is a rabbi as well, so he'll give encouragement for the week. And once a week, the South African team, for example, get together and just talk about their personal lives: it's not a work-related thing." 5. Prevent fragmentationVisit many companies and they'll tell you all about their impressive sounding wellbeing schemes. But often these programs are quite dispersed from each other, and employees can find it difficult to keep track of what's on offer. Worse still, they may not even know they exist. As Jaco puts it: "A lot of wellbeing initiatives are very fragmented. So you have a little thing going on here and a little thing there, but employees don't know where everything is." One way to make it easier for people is by using modern tech. "Today's technology enables you to promote wellness on a day-to-day basis with your employees and also drive holistic wellness," enthuses Jaco. "So our philosophy at YuLife is really to look holistically at wellness, whether it's social, mental, physical wellbeing, and so on. And the main thing we've done is to put all the wellbeing initiatives in our app, all in one place. We've also made it easy for the employer to access that through our employer portal, and make it unique to them."6. Use tech to drive engagementUsed in this way, tech can boost employee engagement in schemes to impressive levels, adds Jaco. And that's certainly been the case with the YuLife app, which harnesses gamification and rewards to encourage employees to do daily wellness tasks. "It's just the most engaging employee wellness program I've ever seen," says Jaco. "We're delivering wellness on a day-to-day basis for everyone in an engaging way. You start from small steps. People don't need to run a marathon, just five minutes of walking or meditation a day to get them going. "We've found that it has a massive impact on people's behaviour in a positive way," he continues. "We see that people using our app are three times more active; they meditate five times more. They use the EAP and Virtual GP service five times more. Normally people often don't know where those services are, but once they're visible, people are much more likely to use them. And in terms of ESG goals, you earn YuCoin for wellness initiatives and then you can redeem those. So you can clean the ocean, you can donate food for people, you can plant trees, and more."A third reason that tech can be useful is that it provides useful data, making the success of wellness schemes more easily measurable. "So for the YuLife app, we went to Forrester in the US and we said okay, is this successful?" explains Jaco. "Can we measure our return on investment? They came back and told us that employers can get a 180% return on investment, mainly through things like reduced absenteeism, increased productivity and so on. So we can already show that we are delivering on employee wellness, because we have the figures to prove it."For more insights on employee wellness, you can view the full discussion here.