Health and wellbeing

The unseen and unsaid
Explored and addressed

Ever sat through the presentation of H&S priorities or the launch of this year's action plans and thought "are we ever going to get to the bit about Health or are we just going to talk about Safety?" 

If you have then you're not alone, increasingly our clients are asking us to help them broaden the debate and tackle the wider Wellbeing agenda so they can move beyond a single focus on safety.

This is, in part, due to a growing recognition that "a healthy workforce is a safer and more productive workforce", and it's also undoubtedly a response to the cold hard facts that stress and stress related absenteeism result in 11.7 million lost working days each year which costs the UK economy somewhere between £6-7 billion¹.

So if you want to put the Health firmly into Health and Safety we have a range of solutions that will help you do just that.

 

If getting Health and Wellbeing on the organisational agenda is half the battle, then the other half is typically about getting individuals to engage and open up – after all, despite the significant progress made in recent years, stress related illness is often still seen as a failure by the individual and mental health is the “last great taboo”.   This context makes it a challenge to get the topic on an agenda, let alone put in place plans and actions that people engage with.

Our approach

Our approach is to offer two different kinds of support:

  • Awareness sessions designed to help people better understand their own mental health and wellbeing, how to be mindful of their impact on others and some practical ways to minimise stressors, manage psychological health and ensure none of this is achieved ‘at the expense of others’.  Some clients as for these sessions to be delivered as part of a wider conference or seminar agenda, others prefer standalone events that are typically a half-day.
  • Workshops for managers and supervisors designed to enable them to create and maintain a working environment where stressors are understood, proactively managed, and the prevalent culture creates and sustains mental wellbeing for those who work in and with their team(s).  This includes how to deal with critical and/or crisis moments in a way that both addresses presenting issues in a practical way whilst bringing to life management behaviours and attributes which support a healthier culture.

All of our courses, workshops and conference sessions incorporate drama-based learning techniques.  Based around situations, scenarios and characters designed to reflect the type of environment your people work in, participants explore what goes on beneath the surface and how the way the organisation works, and how people act and interact, impacts individuals.  This insight is then used to devise individual coping strategies and to develop the skills and techniques necessary to ensure what we do and how we do it is mindful of the impact on the people we work with.

What does this look like in practice?

We tailor our delivery to the organisation and audience so inputs range from conference sessions as part of a broader agenda, through half day awareness workshops (customised to suit any of your people), to full day courses for the managers who have to create the right culture and environment and deal with the difficult issues and moments of crisis.

To ensure our programmes have the appropriate rigour and we incorporate frameworks developed by specialist organisations such as the Health and Safety Executives management standards for key workplace stressors and Mind’s guide for improving mental wellbeing.

Download our flyer…

pdf

¹ Statistics 2015/16:   http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/dayslost.htm
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