The Healthy Work Place

The Healthy Work Place

by Tracey Bevan, Positive Psychology Coach and Housing Officer

I recently attended a seminar on Mindfulness In The Workplace with speakers from big international organisations including LinkedIn and Google. It was heartening to hear the value being assigned to maintaining employee’s mental wellbeing and how this was considered key to an organisation’s own wellbeing.

It’s common sense. The Health and Safety executive recorded 17 million working days lost to work related stress, anxiety or depression in the last year with figures increasing since the pandemic. Promoting staff wellbeing is more than a way to lure new employees or a moral obligation, it is a sensible financial decision. Mentally well people are more productive with between 5 and 9 less sick days each year and with significant positive impact on motivation, productivity, creativity, team dynamics and mindset. A recent meta-analysis  found higher workplace wellbeing equates to increased profitability, greater productivity and customer satisfaction and lower staff turnover.

Keeping employees well! What’s not to love about that? Yet so often it is a tick box, an add-on offered by volunteers and workplace champions, or outsourced to an Employees Assistance Programme. These elements can all help but we can do better than that. We need to do better than that.

Maintaining

If we think of resilience as a resource that can be built or eroded then we get a feel for the sort of on-going, low level input that is called for to maintain wellbeing. We work with families in crisis, people living in poverty, people with mental illness or addictions. Making meaning out of our experiences is how we start to process, accept, learn and then grow from them. Without this, a cycle of deepening compassion fatigue and eventual burnout can follow.

It takes a commitment of time and energy from employees as well as investment from organisations that create opportunities for reflection, to strengthen bonds, consider values and why we do the jobs we do. This is how a ‘growth mindset’ can be established; a mindset that helps people bounce back faster from life’s setbacks and supports them to take up new challenges. All of which improves work performance (Palmer and Green, 2018) and leaves employees feeling valued and safe.

Building

The PERMA model of wellbeing considers the key areas for a happy and flourishing life. PERMA stands for Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievements, elements of which are available from our work. Research is finding more and more evidence that supports the effectiveness of PERMA interventions such as helping employees discover what motivates and energises them, what their strengths are and finding ways to build these into their everyday roles. For me, equality is a key driver and one reason why I work in social housing. Simply being aware of this keeps work more meaningful to me and keeps my eye on the horizon through the ups and downs of the week.

The Future

Offering both structured and organic spaces to reflect and de-stress creates a solid framework on which to pin a workforce’s positive mental wellbeing in much the same way that gym membership and annual health checks can encourage staff to maintain their physical health. The need to take positive action to create these spaces is more crucial now than ever. Hybrid working offers many benefits but also means we are working in greater isolation. Many of the natural times and places to share the day’s difficulties have been lost and we need to find ways to structure these pressure valves back into workplaces, wherever those places are.

Reference

Palmer, S., and Green, S. (2018). “PERMA-powered coaching: building foundations for a flourishing life,” in Positive Psychology Coaching in Practice, eds S. Green and S. Palmer (London: Routledge, 125–142.