Workplace wellbeing is more than a resilience workshop: 9 ideas to create a healthy and happy workplace. 

 Employee wellbeing is essential for a charity to meet the needs of those communities it serves, and working in the third sector has never been easy, but years of austerity and Covid-19 are still impacting, with a workforce that is running on empty, and burnt out. It’s no wonder that charities want to make sure that they prioritise staff wellbeing. Despite their best efforts, too often they don’t go far enough, or the offer isn’t available to all staff. Often charities will take advantage of Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs) which will have a variety of benefits, including counselling and resources; mindfulness offers or resilience courses. 

The trouble is they won’t tackle the impact of a high-pressure environment and potentially place all the responsibility of managing this pressure on the staff member – the thinking may go “if they’ve attended a resilience workshop, why aren’t they more resilient”. 

Plus, these wellbeing offerings are often only available to certain staff. Let me explain, a wellbeing session may be run monthly at head office, and open to all staff, sounds great! But if the organisation has front line services which run on a rota, this isn’t going to be accessible to them if they are a) off shift (as they shouldn’t have to attend on their scheduled time off) or b) if they work in a service which can’t release them from their shift to attend the session. So for this organisation, it may be that only office based staff can attend because they are the only staff available when the sessions are delivered. In this case we need to consider how else the sessions could be delivered so that staff across the organisation could be released to attend, no mean feat when budgets are getting tighter and tighter. 

These interventions address wellbeing at the wrong point, they are reactive instead of proactive. The address the symptom, not the cause. Because if staff are at the point of stress or approaching burnout, these interventions are a sticking plaster. To really prioritise staff wellbeing, charity leaders need to be addressing the culture of the organisation, making it a healthy place to work. 

So, what can you do? Here’s 9 ideas to get you started. 

  1. Understand the workplace stressors for each role (because what causes a Project Worker  stress won’t be what impacts on the Finance Director – and both are just as important) and consider what is in the organisation’s control and what can realistically be done to mitigate it. 

  2. Ensure your values are clearly explained and universally adhered to. Often third sector organisations will have values which relate to not giving up on people, or making a real difference, often along the lines of ‘Above and beyond’ - and invariably they are misinterpreted as staying late and doing stuff outside of you job role. 

  3. Make it ok to make mistakes – mistakes are how we learn and grow. If we allow mistakes, and create space for reflection then you start to build a culture of learning. 

  4.  Support staff to be open and honest – this means as leaders, listening, and being curious, not defensive. Staff need to be able to feedback without fear of negative consequences, and to really be heard. 

  5.  Build a real community – create ways for relationships to be built and nurtured, both within teams or departments, but between the team and the wider organisation. 

  6. Clarity of roles – if individuals and teams understand the roles and goals of their colleagues, and how these together support the organisation’s aims this will support working together instead of against. 

  7.  Make asking for help normal – whether that is about work, or about wellbeing. For staff to feel able to do this, they need to see it modelled by leaders. 

  8. Boundaries need to be rock solid – It's easy for the gradual slipping of boundaries between work and life to start, and leaders making themselves available all the time to be helpful, sets the expectation that everyone is available all the time. 

  9.  Create a positive culture – by highlighting the positives and the successes, but be careful not to fall into the trap of toxic positivity by ignoring the challenges 

 The task of building a healthy and happy place to work is a challenge, it requires the whole leadership team to be on board, and to work together consistently role modelling the behaviours which support such a culture. But for those charities which really work to create environments, it means not only happy employees, but better outcomes for the communities they serve. 

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When did work stop feeling like a calling, and what to do about it now. 

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Why putting yourself first, also puts your staff First.