Health-Oriented Leadership: How Leadership can Support a Healthy Workplace

By: Morgan Hopkins

In the modern post-pandemic world, workplaces are experiencing rapid shifts, be it more employees working from home or integrating new technology and systems into the work environment. Considering these evolving factors, it begs the question, “How do leadership teams keep up?” and better yet, “What type of leadership contributes to the continued health of employees and working environments?”.

Health-oriented Leadership (HoL) is a style of leadership that includes leaders’ explicit health-related support and care for employees’ well-being through direct communication and interaction, leading to a thriving and healthy work environment. Studies have found that not only is HoL an increasingly necessary and effective style of leadership in post-pandemic landscapes (as it is equally successful in promoting staff care behavior in person as it is virtually), but it has also been shown to increase both employee engagement and satisfaction in the workplace. Talk about a win-win scenario!

So, what is Health-oriented Leadership?

HoL is a style of leadership that begins from the top down. In this model, leaders demonstrate a positive standard of behavior and tone regarding their physical and mental well-being that informs and regulates their employees' attitudes toward their health, thus impacting the entire working environment. Health-oriented Leadership relies heavily on verbal and nonverbal communication, frequent contact, and communication between workers and their leadership teams. This leadership style addresses leaders’ communication about health and promotes the design of healthy working environments by examining their values and increasing their awareness of their followers’ health.

How does it work?

Health-oriented Leadership can be visualized as a model resembling a building with three primary levels. The foundation is set by leadership’s relation to their own health and well-being, which, in turn, informs their ability to engage with their employees in a beneficial manner (referred to as Staff Care Behavior), thus creating a positive impact on their employees' relationship to health, and finally creating a holistically healthy work environment.

Level One: Leader’s Self-Care

This foundational aspect of the model focuses on a leader’s own health-related attitudes and behaviors. Studies have shown that leaders' health-related behaviors, attitudes, and standards largely influence their employees and, thus, the working atmosphere. These positive attitudes of health are conveyed to employees via leaders' demonstration of a healthy work and lifestyle balance as well as high levels of disclosure (open dialogue) about their health-related attitudes. Essentially, this model orients leaders as positive role models for their employees and the organization and provides a foundation for employees to believe that their leadership is engaged and invested in their health outcomes. This might look like Leadership modeling a moment of mindfulness before beginning each meeting or opening up dialogue within the work environment by sharing something they found challenging last week and how they approached finding solutions. 

In this model, leadership is the foundation of all other aspects. If leadership demonstrates and speaks openly about their own positive health-related attitudes, it is the first step in creating a holistically healthy environment. 

Level Two: Staff Care

Built from the foundation of Leaders’ Self Care, Staff Care stems from Staff Care Awareness and Staff Care Behavior. It can be described as leaders’ awareness of and behaviors toward employees' health-related attitudes. This level of the model relies on leadership developing personal relationships with employees through frequent contact and check-ins. Staff Care Awareness begins with training in potential warning signs of employee distress and burnout and adequate knowledge and insight of the company's related offerings and resources. Leaders can then utilize their awareness and engage in Staff Care Behavior by acknowledging stressors within the workplace, finding solutions to these stressors when possible, and providing resources to their employees when necessary.

Additionally, leaders can foster and promote employees taking initiative in their own self-care by engaging in health and wellbeing-specific communication that addresses employee concerns within or outside the organization. If the organization offers, leaders can encourage employees to participate in worksite health-promoting activities or programs. Lastly and arguably the most crucial part of Staff Care is that leaders should work to help their employees identify the aspects of work or tasks that bring them the most meaning or sense of fulfillment and work to prioritize that type of work. This way, every employee feels they have a sense of purpose and model for growth, which helps to improve job satisfaction and motivation. Staff Care may look like leadership teams attending regular trainings and conferences with information regarding employee wellbeing. It may look like having frequent small group or one-on-one sessions with their employees to develop personal relationships, thus creating a safe place for employees to disclose any stressors or problems that may impact their work performance. Staff Care may look like regularly polling and taking note of the type of work employees seem to appreciate and excel in so that Leadership might help each employee cultivate their personal goals.  

 For leaders to be influential in Staff Care, they must have both Staff Care Awareness and demonstrate appropriate Staff Care Behavior. 

Level Three: Self-Care of Employees

The focal point of the third level of this model is the Self Care of Employees. Through the proper demonstration of Leaders’ Self Care, which sets the tone and atmosphere of the working environment, combined with leaders exhibiting Staff Care, employees are more likely to be motivated and encouraged to take the initiative in their own health-oriented leadership. Ideally, the administration has set the stage in terms of disclosure so that employees feel empowered and safe communicating their needs to supervisors. Additionally, each employee should feel as though they have had agency in developing work-related goals with the support of their leadership teams. Finally, at this level of the model, employees are aware of and feel comfortable taking advantage of health and well-being workplace offerings and resources available to them. Self-care of Employees may look like an employee volunteering for a project that suits their interest or asking their leadership for opportunities that align with their career goals. This stage may look like an employee who has had a tough quarter seeking out the company's counseling resources and feeling safe disclosing their situation to their leadership teams.

The third stage of this model brings the focus down to the individual employees and their autonomous health-oriented leadership as guided by the environment and standards set within the workplace and their leadership teams. 

The Takeaways:

Health-oriented Leadership (HoL) is a robust and highly effective style of leadership that has been shown to create a strong and vital workplace that promotes employee health by helping to identify and reduce workplace stressors. The three levels of this model, Leadership Self Care, Staff Care, and Self Care of Employees, all rely on one another and work together to culminate a positive, healthy, and stable work environment that aids in employee retention, engagement, and motivation regardless of the working atmosphere.

Sources:

Franke, F., Felfe, J., & Pundt, A. (2014). The impact of health-oriented leadership on follower health: Development and test of a new instrument measuring health-promoting leadership. Zeitschrift Für Personalforschung, 28(1), 139-161. Retrieved from https://login.proxy177.nclive.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/impact-health-oriented-leadership-on-follower/docview/1525836284/se-2

Pischel, S., Felfe, J., & Klebe, L. (2023). “Should I further engage in staff care?”: Employees’ disclosure, leaders’ skills and goal conflict as antecedents of health-oriented leadership. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(1), 162. doi:https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010162