What is wellbeing?
Wellbeing at work isn’t simply the absence of illness, injury or absence. It encompasses the entire continuum of health experience from illness through to thriving and includes mental wellbeing, physical wellbeing and social wellbeing.
When it comes to wellbeing at work, we emphasise preventative measures and proactive measures. It’s far better to remove workplace stressors and equip employees with skills to navigate the demands of work, than to have to spend time and money replacing key employees or providing stress management solutions.
What causes poor workplace wellbeing?
As workplace psychologists, we're best placed to provide solutions that address these human sources of distress, unhappiness and ill health at work.
Decades of high quality research have consistently highlighted the most common job-related threats to workplace wellbeing.
- Job demands: these are factors like workload and time pressure.
- Support: this includes support from colleagues and line management.
- Control: this includes how much influence employees have over their work.
- Role design: this includes role clarity and potential for role conflict.
- Organisational change: this includes management and communication of change.
- Relationships: this includes conflict, friction, harassment and bullying.
However, all working arrangements, jobs and organisational set-ups can combine with human psychology and behaviour to detract from wellbeing. Individual factors that contribute to poor wellbeing outcomes at work include:
- Chronic procrastination
- Unhealthy coping strategies
- Loneliness and ostracism
- Unsustainable working styles
- Failure to delegate
- Lack of boundary management
- A lack of self-compassion
- Insufficient resilience in the face of demands
How can employers support workplace wellbeing?
Threats to wellbeing can come from the work itself, the work environment and how employees think, feel and behave in response to the demands placed upon them. So we need to explore wellbeing from a ‘top down’ organisational perspective and a ‘bottom up’ individual employee perspective.
From a ‘top down’ perspective, employees have a duty of care to minimise the presence of workplace factors that can lead to stress (stressors), which can be done through effective job design, management training, effective management of change, and so on.
From a ‘bottom up’ perspective, employers can support employee wellbeing through coaching, training and wellbeing programmes, to equip them with the self-awareness, insights and skills to more sustainably navigate the pressures, challenges and setbacks that realistically come with work.
How can coaching and training support workplace wellbeing?
We used impactful, evidence-based approaches to equip employees with the insights and skills to make a real difference to their own wellbeing.
By boosting their psychological flexibility, they can ‘unhook’ themselves from unhelpful thoughts and emotions, learning to do what matters – even if it feels uncomfortable or difficult in the moment.
By boosting their resilience, employees can address challenges in a flexible and intentional way (not just hard-headed persistence!) bringing a combination of thinking skills and coping strategies to bear.
By learning how to practice self-care, self-compassion and effective coping, employees can boost their performance at work in sustainable ways, all while avoiding needless self-criticism, rigid responses to problems and unhealthy ways of coping with psychological distress.
Through small daily habits, employees can gain a sense of control over their wellbeing routines, building their psychological, physical and social health in small steps, with big payoffs over time. No need for personal reinvention or disruptive change. “Little and often” is the mantra employees will hear from our team.
Our wellbeing coaching and training solutions bring the science of workplace wellbeing to life in simple and accessible ways. This ensures employees understand the essential building blocks of their wellbeing, the sources of ill health and distress, while building a flexible toolkit they can take forward and bring to life in their daily routines.
Psychological Flexibility
Learn how we can boost the psychological flexibility of your employees, to support wellbeing, job satisfaction and the pursuit of their most important goals.
Resilience
Learn how we can help employees develop their resilience to better cope with the challenges and setbacks that come with the contemporary workplace.
Burnout
Learn how we can help employees avoid burnout, through supporting individuals to develop their resources, and supporting organisations to minimise the sources of distress in the workplace.