If you were to take the people out of an organisation you would be left with some stock and machinery that would be of little value, and possibly some property. It is the people that make an organisation function, so having the people functioning to the best of their ability must surely be best for an organisation. Yet much of what is undertaken in the field of HRM actually serves to detract from people functioning at their best. Evidence from studies of wellbeing in the workplace reveal some interesting findings that raise questions as to whether the current focus of HRM will adapt to the evolving future workplace, or whether it will need to be redrawn along different lines, focussing on maintaining wellbeing above all else in the workplace to enable people to be successful for their organisations.

Much of the literature on wellbeing focuses on work-life balance (WLB) as potentially the most important element that affects people and their behaviour at work. Hence it is the most high profile and most highly legislated area in consideration. However, the evidence in this area is mixed and far from conclusive.

While a measure of organisational health is being heralded by the likes of Henderson Fund Management to allow investors to make more informed decisions about the companies they are investing in, quite how this will be calculated, or what its value will be are yet to be determined. City analysts already take a keen interest in voluntary staff turnover rates, especially in service/consulting businesses where valuation is contingent on the ability of a business to scale quickly and in high growth periods. They see voluntary turnover as a good but crude indicator of employee satisfaction and engagement. They also look to indices such as Gallup Q12 scores that measure engagement. Other measures are emerging in the marketplace. Vielife, for example, has a range of organisational health audits both at the whole organisation and individual employee level, and aim to develop the standardised metric for the measurement of employee wellbeing. Ironically they find that a health and wellbeing index is higher on the agenda of the financial and managing directors