Wellbeing - what works and what may not

A recent piece of research published in the Industrial Relations Journal around three weeks ago revealed that wellbeing at work is not impacted significantly by individual level mental health interventions. Time to jettison the EAP and those Friday lunchtime yoga classes?

Maybe not, but it is essential that we go back to basics.

The piece sets out how it is deeper organisational structural changes that make the real difference to wellbeing.

I'm hardly astonished, but this is an issue I come across a lot, especially in my interim work.

In situations of change, transition and crisis, mental health and wellbeing is often at a low. Over my various roles, I have worked with people on the brink of breakdown, people who cry every time they have a moment alone to talk with me, people who can only see the negative in things, and those who are plugging away with one face at work, but I'm pretty sure are collapsing when they get home.

While I strive to support all of these people in their individual struggles, the last thing I would do is think that sending them off to a mental health training session is going to have any impact in this environment.

We have to start with making sure jobs are achievable, demands are realistic and people have the support within the organisation to both get their work done and live their own lives.

The yoga classes, the resilience training, the mental health surveys - these to me are what you add to a strong, effective structure, and are next to useless in an organisation where there are fundamental problems.

When people are collapsing around me from stress, sending out a mental health survey won't tell me anything I don't already know. And it certainly won't start to make things better.

The concluding sentence of the article's abstract says it all:

Overall, results suggest interventions are not providing additional or appropriate resources in response to job demands

In the charity sector, our job demands are increasingly unendurable. Sending someone off to a resilience training course is not going to magically give them the ability to do two people's work.

What does work?

In my view, it's the following:

1. A unified and achievable organisational strategic plan - whether short or long term

2. Clear performance planning and management processes

3. HR and project management systems and policies that work

4. Managers who are equipped to both manage and support their team

5. Properly funded projects and organisations with sufficient overheads to fund essential infrastructure and relevant training

6. An effective communication culture across teams in all directions.

These are the basic building blocks to organisational wellbeing in my opinion.

Ensuring these are in place will have knock on effects - reduced stress levels, better relationships, more safer spaces, fewer siloes and miscommunications between teams, clarified goals and a more united team, and better balance between outside and work lives. They also highlight where problems lie - for example, where jobs need to be re-designed or grants or contracts are under-funded or over-promised, which leadership then need to take action to resolve.

But what about my EAP?

I'm not anti the individual elements. Regardless of the study linked, I think all charities should have an EAP, if only because we don't pay many charity workers enough to be able to access counselling when they need it, whether work-related or not.

But I don't believe you should be trying to 'build resilience' on one hand, while overloading expectations and providing inadequate support on the other.

Except for CEOs, right?

Of course, wellbeing is not only about leaders and management ensuring this for their team.

I'll never forget my first day at one interim CEO role. I'd been interviewed by the entire staff team as part of the recruitment process (which was a bit strange in itself) and one manager had asked me about my approach to wellbeing. I set out what I thought.

She said she was very keen on this area and wanted to take it forward.

'Great!', I thought.

She was responsible for setting up my first week of appointments.

Reader, I didn't get a single five minute break across my first week. Not a one. No coffee breaks, lunch breaks or comfort breaks. I was scheduled to be in wall-to-wall meetings for the entire week.

My takeaway from this experience was that our approaches to wellbeing were either highly divergent, or for some reason she saw me as somehow exempt from wellbeing entitlements.

And that's a big problem in our sector.

Many charity CEOs are under unimaginable pressure, lack boundaries and don't get enough support from their Boards and their staff team to enable them to survive and thrive in this incredibly difficult context.

So, for leaders who are ensuring wellbeing for their team, Boards need to be ensuring wellbeing for their leaders.

What to do?

Organisational issues are getting ever more complicated- we are learning to embrace a wide range of flexible working, as well as managing newly remote roles and trying to build teams effectively in a hybrid climate.

But the old problems haven't gone away. We can't forget the more basic questions like job design, workloads, performance planning, infrastructure, project funding, management training... and essentially, what our culture feels like to those in it.

Because, without ensuring these issues are right, there's not a resilience training course in the world that is going to help your team.

Felicia Willow is an experienced interim CEO (8 charities and counting) and charity consultant working on strategy, facilitation, governance, organisational effectiveness, crisis and more with charities of all sizes located across the UK. For more information on her services, go to www.willowcharityconsulting.co.uk, or connect with her via LinkedIn.