Aon on why you need a chief wellbeing officer

Wellbeing is a crucial part of Anglo-American professional services giant Aon’s business. It provides comprehensive wellbeing solutions to its clients; the aim is to increase employee to ensure businesses can thrive amid any new, emerging challenges

One example is its portal Well One, which provides access to training, coaching, rewards and recognition programs, as well as financial wellbeing support.

But Aon also wants to practice what it preaches, so the employer really prioritizes wellbeing and resilience within its own 50,000 person strong workforce.

Central to this is employee listening and taking action based on that feedback, as well as having inclusive leadership. For instance, 20% of Aon executive bonuses are tied to diversity and inclusion success, plus the company has 102 business resource groups across 14 countries, including one for mental health.

Hiring a chief wellbeing officer

While Aon was already doing great work around wellbeing (both internally and externally), the COVID-19 pandemic really demonstrated the need for even greater focus on employee health and wellbeing. This was compounded by other global events like the war in Ukraine and natural disasters triggered by climate change.

In response, Aon decided to introduce annual global days off to unplug – this year many employees took to social media to share what they got up to on their day off to reset.

Aon also decided to take an even more dramatic step and create a new role within the HR (or People Org) team – a chief wellbeing officer. In May 2022 it chose to appoint Rachel Fellowes, who had been advising Aon on wellbeing topics for many years.

“Aon was originally a client of mine, so I knew that they were serious about developing strong wellbeing programs. They were putting in the work to elevate their strategies, so I thought this is the perfect time to get on board,” Fellowes tells UNLEASH.

The executive leadership’s commitment to inclusion, diversity and wellbeing was also a big plus for Fellowes; “having leaders like [CEO] Greg Case to stand behind is quite impressive. Coming from my own wellbeing consultancy, I knew that having a C-Suite that listens makes a big difference”.

Fellowes was also enthusiastic about Aon’s ‘smart working’ model that empowers employees to work wherever they are most effective. “Considering Aon has a history in the insurance industry [it is quite impressive] how well we’ve thought through different personas and how we visualize ourselves, whether that be a virtual worker [someone] fully in the office or a hybrid worker.”

Personally, Fellowes was pleased that where she worked (and “how I design my life as a [new] mum” was a “non-conversation” – and she was pleased that this was the case for the rest of the Aon’s 50,000 employees.

Practicing what you preach on wellbeing

Fellowes and Aon’s version of chief wellbeing officer is slightly different from the design elsewhere; this is because it is closely linked to the company’s business model.

She describes her role as a three-foot stool. While she sits in the People Org (or HR) department and sets the internal wellbeing strategies for Aon’s employees and “that’s absolutely a priority”, she also works on the company’s external wellbeing solutions.

“I have another foot in our health solutions practice and a third foot, if you will, in the Human Capital Solutions practice”. While Fellowes reports into Aon’s CPO Lisa Stevens, Stevens herself is also external facing as she is head of Human Capital Solutions too.

Rachel Fellowes, chief wellbeing officer, Aon.

This means that Fellowes (and Stevens) ensure Aon not only offers best-in-class wellbeing solutions to its clients and their employees, but that it also has top-notch wellbeing strategies for its own employees.

To Fellowes and Aon, there is no point in these two elements to be disconnected or in competition with each other. Ultimately, if a client is doing inspirational things around wellbeing, why shouldn’t Aon learn from that (and vice versa)?

“As much as possible, we are trying to hold ourselves accountable by looking externally to make sure we are relevant to what the market is up to,” notes Fellowes. “The only way we stay relevant is by listening to the outside.”

Data and wellbeing at AON

Fellowes is now six months into her role as Aon’s chief wellbeing officer, so UNLEASH was keen to find out what impact she has had so far, and what her future priorities are.

She started by linking wellbeing with the equity part of diversity, equity and inclusion – aka ensuring that all Aon employees, no matter where they live, have the same access to the resources and wellbeing support they need.

Currently, Aon doesn’t have a global employee assistance program provider – this is something that Fellowes will be working on “because then we can guarantee those foundational blocks for everyone”, as well as get access to “consistent data from across the world”.

This would then allow Aon to “educate all managers on how to acknowledge a sign or red flags” that require specific interventions.

Another priority for Fellowes has been ensuring that employees are actually making the most of the wellbeing resources that are available to them. As a result, Aon “is going through a personalization approach. We are orientating everything that we offer to meaningful events in our lives” – that could be the cost of living crisis, a promotion, or coming back to work after pregnancy or illness.

“It is a more accessible way to think about how to resolve certain issues based on the different types of support that we haven’t thought about before,” notes Fellowes. “We have been noticing our clients doing this” and they are helping “colleagues identify which resources best meet them where they are”.

Giving her personal example, Fellowes shares: “As a new mum, it is much easier for me to listen to an audio-based wellness resource while I am on the go, rather than having to find time to sit down and read materials,” notes Fellowes.

The final example that Fellowes gives is very close to her heart – the Human Sustainability Index. Fellowes created this index when running her own consultancy, Yoke; “it measures personal and team resilience”, but in a scalable, but also personal way.

The reality is “most organizations have an ill-being strategy, not a wellbeing strategy. They measure things that go wrong, and that may affect 5% or 10% of the working population”, according to Fellowes.

Instead, they should be measuring “thriving wellbeing components” not just “reacting when people are on the edge of burnout”. “It is about being proactive” and having a collective conversation.

It’s been rolled out at Aon to 350 leaders, with the long-term goal of applying the learnings to the rest of the company. Using the index, these leaders can look at their resilience, and what external factors impact it (are they more resilient at certain times of the year, or in certain working environments”. Aon is planning to roll out the Human Sustainability Index to client in the near future.

According to Fellowes, “an organization is only as resilient as its people” so having visibility around employee resilience is good for business, plus will keep attrition rates low.

Aon’s 2021 global wellbeing survey of more than 1,500 companies globally found that those who build resilient workforce have healthy employees (20%), lower turnover (42%), and higher productivity (42%).

The future of chief wellbeing officers

While Aon is not the first organization to appoint a chief wellbeing officer, it is definitely ahead of the curve. Other organizations with chief wellbeing officers include Clifford Chance, bp, Schroders, EY and Deloitte.

But why do companies need someone explicitly in charge of wellbeing? What is the issue with the traditional approach to wellbeing?

Fellowes shares that right now, when “resilience is being tested”, wellbeing cannot wait. To create better workplaces and businesses, organizations need someone to get proactive and champion employee wellbeing at the very top.

Chief wellbeing officers can “serve as a glue between leadership strategy and the more traditional HR functions, whether it be benefits, rewards, or learning and development”.

For Fellowes, wellbeing must not be standalone. It needs to be embedded into everything companies are already doing – and this is what Aon is trying to do by appointing a chief wellbeing officer.

Unsurprisingly, Fellowes is a very strong advocate for other companies to follow Aon’s lead and appoint a chief wellbeing officer. “I smile whenever I hear about an appointment”; a peer group of chief wellbeing officers is being created where they can give “each other comfort of what good looks like” and share tips and tricks.

In the same way that Aon is learning from and sharing wellbeing best practices with clients, Fellowes is clear that chief wellbeing officers must share their ideas, successes and failures; “we are not competing against each other, we’re driving the course together”.

But, as Fellowes wrote in a LinkedIn newsletter, “for real change on the wellbeing agenda, there has to be more of us, speaking with CEOs and senior business leaders, helping them understand the ways to move the dial”.

Having a chief wellbeing officer also helps organizations to leverage data to articulate the return on investment from wellbeing. Currently, “the maturity of that data and how we report that to our leadership, and externally to our stakeholders, is not there yet”, but “the impact we’re having is huge” in telling those stories about the importance of investing in wellbeing.

However, Fellowes is very clear that like a chief diversity officer, eventually the role of the chief wellbeing officer will become redundant.

It is crucial at this point in time to change the conversation around wellbeing at work, but long-term “we want everyone to become their own wellbeing champion; that’s individuals, managers and leaders”.

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