The three pitfalls that undermine organizational vitality.
They had done everything right—or so they thought.
The company poured money into “vitality.” Gym memberships, mindfulness apps, fruit baskets, resilience workshops, health checks, recovery programs for the burned-out. Team coaching. The dashboard looked impressive. Finally they could say: “We’re investing in our people.”
Yet every major change initiative still stalled. New strategies arrived with fanfare and then quietly died in the organization.
The problem was not a lack of investment, nor of will. The problem was that the organization had misunderstood what vitality is.
The three pitfalls behind why vitality investments have little return
Organizations invest heavily in vitality, hoping it will deliver higher-performing employees. In reality, it rarely does. Instead, the organization remains hard to move forward.
The main reason: it typically boils down to three expensive pitfalls.
Equalize health with vitality
Assuming that if people are healthy, performance and the willingness to change will follow — that assumption is a fallacy. Certainly when you consider the second pitfall.
“Healthy people are not equal to people who also perform at their best or embrace change.”
Make it all optional
A scattered mix of employee benefits (gym memberships, mindfulness apps, fruit baskets, resilience workshops, health checks, recovery programs for the burned-out, coaching) that costs a fortune, and whose impact is heavily overestimated:
- It’s optional, so it reaches only a fraction of the workforce, and leaves the organization no more vital than before.
- It’s a one-size-fits-all approach — again mostly “curative” (focused on mental health and wellbeing) — that does not fit the needs of large groups, like senior management.
- The quality is most often not validated. Sleep programs, for example, are 95% outdated.
Label curative interventions as vitality, focusing on the absent instead of the present
Organizations label absenteeism interventions as vitality. Burnout programs. Recovery programs. Reintegration programs. Mental health interventions.
These programs are important. They are necessary. They focus on people who are absent. But these people cannot contribute to any result that benefits the organization! So it’s not organizational vitality at all.
Vitality focuses on people who are present, because they determine the output — profit, customer satisfaction, and more.
What is Value Based Vitality?
For virtually every business challenge, proven models exist to tackle it in a structured way. Until now, vitality lacked a robust model. As a result, investments have largely been driven by wishful thinking — with zero demonstrable, measurable results.
True vitality must focus on everyone who is present: enabling every individual to perform better and adapt smoothly to change. That is what an agile organization looks like.
Value Based Vitality (VBV) is that model. It delivers five interconnected criteria that guide the selection and deployment of interventions that actually build vitality.
How to use it
This is what it delivers:
- Design a clear vitality strategy (objectives & means)
- Audit and rationalize existing instruments
- Steer the HR team and delivery partners (without this, everything fragments)
- Objectively evaluate suppliers on both offering and quality
VBV turns vitality into what it is meant to be: the engine of an agile organization — healthy, energetic, resilient and adaptive.
Vitality is the ultimate leverage for your investments in change management.