Have you heard about Engage For Success? We’ve been lucky enough to be involved with them right from the very beginning, after a chance conversation with David McLeod (one of the founders) at a conference, just as Emma was starting People Lab. In case you don’t know much about them they are a growing, dynamic, voluntary movement promoting employee engagement as a better way to work that benefits employees, teams and whole organisations.
What we love about the Engage for Success movement is their generosity in sharing cutting edge thinking and practice… for FREE!! Anyone that has been on one of our courses will know that their ‘evidence’ infographic is essentially your employee engagement business case on a page.
They have also recently published a Wellbeing report, looking at Covid-19 recovery and employee mental health which is well worth a look.
As we slowly begin to take tentative steps to return to a ‘better normal’ (fingers crossed), the ‘fourth wave’ of the pandemic, as depicted in the illustration below, is starting to feel more like a tsunami.
Stress at work was a challenge even before the global pandemic. And we know that isolation and loneliness aren’t good for our mental health. Research from Bingham Young University shows that being lonely can even shorten your life expectancy. With each passing day, new research paints a pretty gloomy picture on the current state of the nation’s mental health. Event the UK Government is taking this seriously, with a recent announcement of a major reform of the Mental Health Act.
So where do we go from here? Within the Engage for Success report, Gethin Nadin, who is the chair of the Wellbeing ‘thought and action group’, asked a number of experts to share their advice for employers, to help them create effective wellbeing strategies as we enter this period of recovery.
The advice shared within the paper starts by emphasising the need to take a human-centred approach to wellbeing, which we whole-heartedly support. The era of organisations taking one-size fits all approach to wellbeing has had its day. Our own research has shown us that often wellbeing programmes fall short for the following reasons:
- They focus on isolated and disconnected interventions that are often superficial
- They fail to address the context – leadership and management, culture and the work
- They deliver top down initiatives done to people, failing to co-design with the people that matter
We advocate taking a human-centred approach, to look after the well-being of your people and your organisation. Our unique approach includes the following steps:
- Build the foundations with positive psychology – Help your people, managers and leaders understand and create the building blocks of wellbeing at an individual, team and cultural level
- Find the wellbeing levers that matter to your people, teams and culture – Use an empathy based discovery process to find the most important problems and opportunities to solve
- Design intelligent, joined up solutions – using the best of design thinking and positive psychology to support you and your teams, to co-create and test new, more impactful solutions
Our tools and services draw on positive psychology and design thinking to overcome the shortcomings in many well-being approaches. If you’re interested in exploring the ways in which we work with organisations to promote employee wellbeing, here a few examples of recent projects:
- Capability building for leaders and managers, to understand and work with the full organisational context of wellbeing
- Development of a wellbeing toolkit for managers to help them have better conversations with their teams
- Wellbeing and design thinking workshops for HR and other people teams, to learn and practice a new approach to identifying and solving wellbeing issues across the organisation
- Wellbeing solutions design, based on positive psychology and design thinking to improve resilience
We’ve also created a free Wellbeing Toolkit, to help you build a workplace where your people can thrive and be at their best. Drawing on years of experience, this toolkit will share expertise in wellbeing and positive psychology, giving you access to a range of resources to build your capability and credibility. Every week you’ll receive some simple, practical tools, videos, and more, to develop and improve employee wellbeing in your organisation. Sign up now to receive the free eight week programme.
If you would like to hear more about how we can support you with Wellbeing, get in touch today.
