Wellbeing strategies are often spoken about at board meetings.
They are added to lists, delegated to managers, thrown about on Kanban boards and box ticked; yet so often they remain a meaningless exercise that has no impact on the staff they are supposed to be supporting.
Workers are suffering in silence.
When staff struggle, the bottom line is affected, and no-one wins.
When a wellbeing strategy is an afterthought or a document without substance, workers carry on in their struggle, and organisations feel the impact on their numbers and morale.
Whether it’s anxiety, depression, pandemic related trauma or stress-related health issues, organisations need to wise up to the needs of their employees. When they have the means and the tools to create a plan that works, and that creates a culture of wellbeing that?s ongoing and sustainable, the impact is immense.
Our environment is a non-stop triggering mechanism whose impact on our behaviour is too significant to be ignored.?
Marshall Goldsmith (Executive Leadership Coach and Author)
I truly believe that people don’t need to go on suffering alone
It’s my job and my driving passion to make sure that employees have effective mental and physical health support in the workplace.
I design and implement strategies with organisations to enable workplaces to have a real plan that actually works.
Creating a wellbeing plan is so much more than bringing in a wellbeing trainer for an hour or two, or adding some buzzwords to a document with no action plan in place.
Box ticking is ineffective, costly in the long term, and is not designed for the human element of day to day interactions and workplace culture.
Here are some simple steps that I work with to design and complement a strategy that actually works.
1. Know Your Data
Understand the date or your organisation. Getting to grips with the stats and numbers for how wellbeing is affecting absences, production or delivery times, budgets and bottom lines is where the true picture really starts to take shape.
2. Know Your Humans
Getting to know the humans in your organisation adds the qual to the quant. How are they really feeling, what are they experiencing? What do they need to be able to thrive? An organisation needs to be able to gain insights before creating any sort of a plan. One size definitely doesn’t fit all.
- Design The Plan
This is where the numbers and knowledge get combined to create a plan that has clear steps to work, and each plan will depend on the size and type of organisation. A ‘train and go’ approach doesn’t work here, as each workplace has different cultures, structures, and needs.Knowing how to adjust for variables and bespoke needs is where I come in and create a roadmap. - Start the Plan
As with any change of culture or new system, beginning the strategy is where the work really starts. This is where we discover obstacles to overcome, challenges to be met, and identify where more support is needed. - Revise and Review
This part is ongoing. A wellbeing strategy cannot just be a plug and play template. With any organisation and collection of humans, there will be very human problems to overcome and to work with in order to enable a truly effective and robust wellbeing structure – but it’s worth it (and the ROI data backs this up all the way).
The best part is that a truly effective plan with an independent organisation can cost a fraction of the cost of the big agencies, and yields enormous results.
‘Each one of us is like that butterfly, the Butterfly Effect. And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organisations, our families and our communities.’
Shawn Achor (Author of The Happiness Advantage)
To get started with resources on creating a real human strategy in the workplace, join my webinar. Sign up here for more details.
See you there.
Pete
