Posts tagged ‘wellbeing’
mindtrip reflections of ideas, thoughts, hints and tips and book recommendations focused around building a flourishing work environment.
In my coaching with individuals and supporting Leaders and Managers within Organisations the topic of resilience, positivity and ‘can-do’ attitude generally comes up. The following are books that talk about concepts, tools and perspectives that are at the heart of my coaching with both individuals and organisations. Each book interlinks with the others and focuses on the relationship between how we see the world and our emotional and behavioural reaction to it.
To help us in developing our resilience, through coaching, it is useful to explore the links between our thoughts, actions and emotions when people are resilient and when they are not.
Wellbeing at Work Survey for both Individuals, Teams and Organisations
January 15th, 2013
Heather Johnston
Update: This survey has now been phased out. I do have a number of other surveys I use please do contact me to find out more.
At the end of last year, to further develop my services to sustain wellbeing within organisations in these current tough times, I attended a Masterclass with Nic Marks on a new Wellbeing at Work survey. Nic is known for his great work on wellbeing and developing the happy planet index
The survey is available to individuals and small teams (up to 5) and for a small cost of £6 per head (plus VAT) an organisation/team can survey its staff and gets results broken down by their own chosen demographics. Larger organisations will be able to take advantage of lowering marginal costs per user if they choose to survey the whole organisation. Small organisations can for the first time have a state of the art staff survey at an exceptionally reasonable cost.
The survey is based on a dynamic model of wellbeing developed with leading experts and is uniquely grounded in the latest psychological findings around wellbeing and happiness. Each question has been carefully selected to reflect what the evidence says impacts well-being at work and has been tested with thousands of respondents.
The wellbeing survey results give a more complete picture of employees’ experience than standard engagement surveys as it includes engagement and stress but also employees’ positive emotional experiences. For Chief Executives, Directors and HR departments the results can be compared between teams or by other demographics and the results act as a “mirror” reflecting back what is happening within the organisation and help people to have insights on how work could be happier.
What I like about the survey is that it provides instant individual as well as organisational results for real-time feedback, provides a simple interface presenting results in traffic light colours and has National benchmarks automatically built into the questions, providing individuals, teams and organisations with an anchor point to understand and compare scores. The survey can also be repeated over time to measure any change. To find out more have a look at the survey website
If you are interested in taking a temperature check of your organisation or team and are committed to some follow up action I believe this is a great tool to open up some very important discussions around sustaining and improving happiness at work. As research shows happier employees are more productive, healthier and creative and are more loyal and provide better customer service to clients. A win-win!
Please get in touch if you would like to find out more!
On the day that Bob Diamond resigns I can’t help wondering about how success is defined and its ultimate impact on human and therefore organisational and societal behaviour….
Having worked in both Investment Banking and in the NHS and consulted in a number of other sectors, I have got to experience a number of ‘cultures’ at work. Having made the step into self employment 8 years ago, it makes you have a long hard think about what type of life work you want to craft for yourself, what do you stand for, what type of work do you want to offer and what do you not want to do…In effect how do you want to define your own success, values and ethics.
In organisations, it is very difficult to step out of line with the current way of doing things without being seen as a maverick, a loner or troublemaker. This is why it is so crucially important for Leaders, individuals, teams and organisations to take a step back regularly and look at what they are creating and what success they are chasing. Is it purely for individual gain or for the benefit of our particular group be it a team or an organisation or even a sector? Perspective is key.
It is a tricky balancing act to please many different parties with different priorities. However, if we do not spend time really thinking about what we stand for, the consequences of our actions and how we define success we are likely to be swept away by the current tide…well if they are doing it, it must be alright…yes?…well not always!
In these current turbulent times, it forces us to look at how we define our success and I believe a reflection on our values cannot be a bad thing. Looking at the situations we face and the decisions we make from a view wider than ourselves, considering the impact and consequences at a societal rather than an individual level (for personal gain) may help in navigating us down a path with our integrity intact.
Central to my positive psychology approach to Organisational Development and Coaching, is looking at whether an individual is flourishing in their work and their wider life. By focusing on helping an individual explore their strengths and helping align these with their work there can be a win/win in terms of an individual’s happiness and wellbeing as well as an increase in individual and organisational productivity.
An interesting article, written by Dr Bridget Juniper and promoted by Action for Happiness, about the downfalls of traditional productivity orientated employee engagement measurement, argues the case for employee wellbeing becoming more central in workplace productivity measures and quotes
…the top 10 drivers of employee engagement, identified by Towers Watson – ISR, show that, of 75 possible areas, the one that was rated the most important was the extent to which employees believed that their senior management had a sincere interest in their wellbeing.
The research goes on to ask employees whether or not they think their senior management actually exhibit this behaviour, with only 39% believing this to be the case. By contrast, the second driver relates to employee development, which is more often associated with conventional engagement measures.
In these times of uncertainty and strain, even more consideration needs to be given to employee wellbeing both for the benefit of the individual but also for organisations and society as a whole. By creating leadership strategies and working practices that help to enhance wellbeing, we will be helping all of us to remain resourceful, happy, healthy and productive.
Research shows that developing a supportive organisational culture is as important if more than important than just focusing on individual employee interventions e.g. health and wellbeing days and training.
As part of our Organisational Development offering we will work with you to think about the wider culture that your Leadership, Management and people policies and practices create within your organisation. Through a consultancy approach, informed by wellbeing and staff survey metrics, we will look to help inform your wider people, health and wellbeing strategies, considering the lifecycle of where you are as an organisation; the natural lifecycle of employees within the organisation and the different evidence based elements that combine to create flourishing organisations.
Consideration will be taken of how ‘joined up’ your approach is, its sustainability, employee happiness, organisational culture, structure, policies and context and the impact of external influences and growth. Through taking a stock check of current practices we can work together to think about how this influences employee engagement within the organisation and work with you to build on best practices to support your organisation’s and individual’s positive future growth and wellbeing. Some of the work that I provide includes
- Top team strategy workshops and team awaydays/retreats tailored to team needs
- Review and/or writing people strategy
- Writing a tailored wellbeing strategy
- Working closely with your inhouse or other consultants to provide joined up people practices that are aligned to company values and culture and have staff wellbeing at their heart
- Tailored workshops and facilitated sessions around eliciting company values and business strategy
- Tailored workshops and online learning focused around healthy management and employee wellbeing
- Team wellbeing reviews and specialist people reviews to provide objective feedback to inform your action planning and strategies
- One to one coaching
- Strengths based learning interventions
- Mindfulness
Case studies
I have been working for 18 months with Perrywood and award winning family run garden centre based in Essex and Suffolk . They have grown considerably with their success and needed help in crystallising their people strategy, finalising their values and implementing an approach to support staff wellbeing. The work started with running a happiness at work survey to establish key areas of focus and then writing and implementing a people strategy as well as a wellbeing strategy. We have taken an iterative holistic approach that looks at both the structure, policies and processes as well as culture, L&D, staff feedback and involvement as well as establishing partnerships with occupational health and EAP providers.
I have worked with two branches of mind on looking at their own staff happiness at work through an all staff evidence based happiness survey. After completing the survey I then debriefed the results to the top teams and also to staff. Both organisations then used the results of these surveys to inform their people strategy going forward.
I worked with the Pensions Management Institute to design and facilitate a whole organisation business planning and values day ahead of the introduction of auto enrolment. These types of days are a great way of bringing teams together, to gather views of everyone on organisational strategy and values so that people feel included and heard. My approach is to add a bit of creativity in the mix so you won’t see hours of powerpoint slides!