The pandemic has forced many businesses to rethink their work model. Several companies are now thinking more about the holistic wellbeing of their employees, where their happiness and physical wellbeing is as important as their income. This has created a new position within businesses: the Wellness Manager.

Looking back at this past 2020, we can take stock of the burnout suffered by workers in the healthcare sector. This event has made large organisations realise the need to create a figure within businesses beyond the human resources director, an expert profile in the well-being of their staff, as Colleen Reilly explains in Forbes magazine. As Dr. Jonathan Ripp, director of wellness at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, explains to Forbes, this profile has grown on a large scale in many companies this past 2020, and believes that it may be a very common professional profile in the next ten years from now, especially in large companies.

Beyond the human resources department: the welfare manager

And what is the task of a welfare manager? Well, according to Reilly herself, it has to be a person who supports the human resources director of the company, to work together and strategically with the same common goal: to generate well-being for their workers. A few days ago, Amazon went further and posted a news item with its new wellness tool for workers: a relaxation cabin called Amazen. The news caused so much criticism on the net that, hours later, Amazon deleted the news, and now it is only available in other news media, such as Euronews. Perhaps Amazon wanted to go further but too fast in terms of advances for the wellbeing of its workers, we will focus on explaining what are the skills of a wellbeing manager.

Businesses promote wellness culture

Colleen Reilly analyses this figure as a profile responsible for having a culture and an ethic of well-being within the entire organisation, with the skills to know how to integrate both professional well-being, physical well-being and not forgetting to highlight the financial well-being of each of the workers. It also has to be a person with a high strategic and business vision, a visionary, influential, empathetic person, with knowledge of workers’ experiences and, above all, collaborative. This figure is beginning to bear fruit, and specifically  David Tomás has been the first person to be recognised as the first director of happiness in our country, with the promotion of people’s well-being.

Do you feel like looking for new professional challenges? What do you think about trying your hand at managing people’s wellbeing? Times are changing and businesses are adapting their working environments to their employees. And we ask ourselves: How soon will you see this new profile called wellness manager in our work organisation?

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