Wellbeing

Sustainable. Positive. Actionable.

Employee wellbeing is at the very core of what we do. We work at the intersection of wellbeing, productivity and professional effectiveness, three mutually supporting themes

Our mission is to help people move from merely surviving work to actually thriving at work and a focus on wellbeing certainly contributes to that.

Frequently misunderstood or over-simplified, workplace wellbeing predicts crucial organisational metrics like turnover, productivity and employer brand. It needs to be on the agenda for every senior leader.

At WorkLifePsych, we want to give employees and organisations the tools they need to improve and maintain workplace wellbeing – using evidence-based approaches – in an accessible and actionable way. Read on to find out more about our approach and how we can help you and your employees attain your wellbeing goals.

The business case for investing in wellbeing

The evidence for how work can negatively impact our wellbeing has been piling up for more than half a century, yet still some organisational stakeholders need convincing that it’s worthy of their focus.

The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) summarised their health and safety at work statistics in 2018, highlighting the following:

There were 1.4 million work-related ill health cases in 2017/18
In 2017/18, there were 0.6 million cases of work-related stress, anxiety or depression
They estimate a combined cost of work-related ill health to be £9.7 billion
26.8 million days were lost to work-related ill health in 2017/18
Of these, 15.4 million working days were lost due to stress, anxiety or depression
These few data points underline that wellbeing at work is a serious business and should be a key focus for organisations. Additionally, prevention is better than cure. This means an investment in ongoing wellbeing activities, to support employee health before illness kicks in, bringing with it the inevitable disruption and costs.

How we can help

When it comes to wellbeing at work, we can help you and your employees from several complementary perspectives.

Strategic Guidance and Support

Before diving in and launching a range of well-intentioned initiatives to improve wellbeing, we can help you adopt a strategic perspective, quantify your challenges and identify interventions most likely to have a positive impact.

We’ll help you clarify your priorities when it comes to wellbeing, quantifying your organisational wellbeing challenge, assist with alignment against your organisational values and strategy and work with you to rollout evidence-based and impactful interventions.

When you’ve made an investment in improving the wellbeing of your employees, you want to know how well it has achieved its aims. We can work with you to evaluate the impact of your wellbeing initiatives, using a range of measures and approaches, each one designed to withstand the scrutiny of your senior stakeholders – and allowing you to demonstrate how your organisation is making working life better for employees.

Stress Management Solutions

Simply put, when we believe our resources to deal with the challenges we face are insufficient, we experience stress. It may be a brief episode, down to an unmanageable workload, or it may be a chronic experience, resulting from the fundamentals of how our job is designed.

Whatever its cause, stress damages our mental and physical wellbeing, impacts productivity, increases turnover and costs the national economy hundreds of millions of pounds every year. We can support individuals, teams and your entire organisation by bringing a robust and evidence-based approach to the problem at hand.

We can conduct a stress audit to quantify the issue, provide coaching for individuals impacted by workplace pressure, provide workshops for groups and bespoke stress-themed sessions for teams. We can also include awareness and stress management content to your existing development programmes.

Work-life Balance Support

The interface between the workplace and home is frequently a source of difficulty and stress. Its subjective nature means that one-size-fits all policies and rules rarely work for the majority of employees – sometimes even removing the flexibility they need.

As experts in the work-life interface, we take a different perspective. It’s not about ‘balance’, it’s not about just two areas of our life and it’s not about reaching a static, perfect outcome.

We emphasise the need to reflect on roles, goals, values, responsibilities and workload, as well as the ‘must do’s’ and ‘nice to haves’ of life. Our support gives employees a personalised approach to help them navigate work-life challenges, based on their unique circumstances, values and personality.

We can provide one-to-one coaching, workshops for groups or bespoke team development sessions all based on sound science and practical tools.

Building and Maintaining Resilience

Resilience is a personal attribute that speaks to persistence in the face of challenges and setbacks and healthy ways of dealing with difficulties. It comprises both psychological and behavioural components and impacts productivity and wellbeing. It should be a focus for every organisation.

We can use evidence-based approaches to take a measure of individual, team or organisational resilience and provide value-add feedback to ensure it’s understood and can be acted upon. We can provide coaching for individuals, run workshops for groups and create bespoke team development workshops with resilience as the theme.

Our ‘Fit for the Future’ one day resilience workshop can be augmented with the completion of a Resilience questionnaire (the RQi) and individual feedback, to provide additional individual insight.

Developing Psychological Flexibility

Psychological Flexibility is a set of thinking and behavioural skills which help us deal with pressure and setbacks in a healthier and more sustainable way.

By developing these skills, we become more aware of the present moment, are less likely to be led by unhelpful emotions and can deal more effectively with unhelpful thinking patterns, such as a harsh inner critic.

The research base supporting the impact of psychological flexibility on wellbeing, job satisfaction and productivity is impressive. And the good news is, that because they are skills, just about anyone has the capacity to build their psychological flexibility and experience the benefits it brings. As it’s based on principles, rather than rules, it’s incredibly flexible. And so we can teach people the core skills through one-to-one coaching, formal training courses or indeed add the content to structured development programmes.

Mental Health at Work

The increase in awareness of mental health in recent years is a welcome development. But the recent figures from the HSE quoted above also serve to underline just how series the mental health challenge is in the workplace.

Our ‘Think Again’ one-day workshop focuses on demystifying mental health and increasing delegates’ comfort in speaking about it. We present mental health as a continuum, rather than categories or labels. We explore the origins of common mental health conditions (e.g. depression, anxiety, job-related stress), their prevalence in the population, and the success of various therapeutic interventions.

This is not a therapy workshop, rather an opportunity to focus on facts and have a helpful discussion about everyone’s mental health.