How does wellbeing work?
A year ago when we were planning our new webinar series, the title Wellbeing Works felt right – nice and affirmative, making the connection with the workplace which is where we engage with our members, plus it works well as a hashtag! But when you stop and ask yourself, how does wellbeing work, it’s helpful to go back to basics. In this blog, I’m reflecting almost a year on from our first episode, and the lessons in that conversation with Jack Green and Jenny Lloyd really bear reminding.
Wellbeing works when you remember you’re human
Jack’s insight, the real ah-ha! moment for me, was the reminder that we’re human, not machines. Some days, 60% is all you can give and that has to be enough. This applies whether you are training as an elite athlete like Jack was, or working with your team in a business environment. Maximum effort can’t be sustained in a quality way for long, long hours don’t equate to productive time and training through an injury (or the workplace equivalent!) is notoriously damaging in the longer term.
It may sound obvious, but it’s often lost in the race for deadlines, revenues, client delivery, resolving issues. This brings me to the second nugget:
Measure performance with a wellbeing lens
As Jack said, is it a success if a project or target is delivered, if it breaks people along the way? In his work with various organisations, he encourages leaders to identify the managers who are delivering whilst also looking after their people. Some may do this instinctively, but this isn’t fail-safe, so there should be frameworks and tools in place to enable managers to learn, practice and hone their skills in this way.
But it’s not just a soft and fluffy context, there’s a practical outcome to all this:
Teams that are thriving deliver business results
There’s a clear return on the investment this approach requires, it’s not just a nice-to-have. This is something emphasised by our other podcast guest, Jenny Lloyd, Diversity and Wellbeing Manager at Magic Circle law firm Linklaters LLP.
At Linklaters, they don’t make excuses for the reality of the driven, long hours culture of their sector. Instead they focus on putting in place measures to support all their people preventatively, building resilience and positive wellbeing habits. The insights they gained from the pilots they ran with BetterSpace in 2019 and 2020 really made the case for personalised choice across all aspects of mental health and wellbeing. The firm has subsequently implemented BetterSpace for all their people, secure in the knowledge that this will help underpin their high performance.
I hope that wets your appetite to listen to the full webinar, there are many nuggets in there!
ABOUT BETTERSPACE
BetterSpace is the employee wellbeing platform putting control where it belongs: in the hands of the individual employee. Our groundbreaking solution has been developed with medical and domain expertise and is aligned to our Six Pillars of Wellbeing. BetterSpace empowers your workforce to understand and fulfill their mental health needs.
This approach has achieved engagement rates of 94%, compared to the average usage rate of 2-18% for Employee Assistance Programmes and 10-40% for points solutions.
Want to know more? Schedule a product demonstration with us today.
