7 Steps to a Winning Wellbeing Plan

Lessons for Leaders

7 Steps to a Winning Wellbeing Plan

This week I'm talking about the 7 steps that you can take to create winning wellbeing plans in your organisation and sharing exactly what would be good things so that there are not just knee jerk reactions and plugging gaps.

A quick run down of the 7 Steps to Winning Wellbeing areas we look at in the episode will be:

1. Issues
2. Needs
3. Benefits
4. Barriers
5. Creating the Plan
6. Implementation
7. Review

I'm talking to HR and Wellbeing leads who are looking at the wellbeing plans for their organisations and with the pandemic it has become more important to look at and support people in organisations.

I've created these 7 steps to winning wellbeing during the time I've spent working with organisations.

1. Issues

You need to know what's going on, what you need to fix and what issues you have that you already know about. Is it high absence, people not talking or something else.

Think about why you are creating this wellbeing plan so that you are delivering things that are helpful for people.

Do you have senior leadership buy-in - because this is important.

2. Identify

You really need to ask your people. Whilst I can say what's going on with trends and issues with organisations, but if you want to hit the spot you need to ask your people. It also builds trust, they feel listened to and that they are valued.

This can be done with questionnaires (I have one) or you can run your own, buy in packages or have me create and deliver for you.

Run focus groups (or I can run them for you!) and you can be listening to employees and ask where they are struggling (this is one of the first questions I ask on my webinars.

What team do you have around you - is there MHFA, EAP, OH or wellbeing champions? What are the policies in your organisation already - are there others that you want and need?

Who is responsibility in your organisation, do you have budget and what return on investment is needed?

3. Benefits

Think about the benefits that this wellbeing plan will bring to the organisation.

It might be benefits to the employer in reducing absences or attrition. It might be benefits to the employee with a boost of morale, helping them to be happier, healthier (all of these have an employer impact).

It might be about improving performance or all sorts of other reasons and then when you have these 3 plans, then the benefits will be part of the communication plan that will encourage people to be involved.

4. Barriers

Looks at the barriers to success. If you haven't got leadershp buy-in then it's likely to be a barrier for you.

How are people feeling?

Will you make these trainings mandatory or voluntary?

Will you be raising the question about the stigma of mental health? How will you be careful that people don't feel ashamed of their difficulties?

Make sure you're not doing too much too soon and throwing all things at people or mixing too many different topics and subjects. If you do this it will create confusion and people won't know what 'thing' to do first.

So it's important that you look at where the barriers are to ensure that your winning wellbeing plan is successful.

5. Creating Your Winning Wellbeing Plan

When you create your actual programme, look at how it's going to work and what it will look like. Whether that is about having a monthly focus, doing things yourself, brining in people with expertise, using webinars, lunch and learn sessions, half day workshops, group coaching, 1;1 coaching is all part of the options you have.

Monthly themes that I work with are:

• Stress and anxiety
• Resilience
• Mens health
• Menopause (listen how this isn't just a women's issue)
• Mental health (both support people, and helping themselves)
• Working well fro home
• Creating connections
• Self care
• Fitness
• Sleep issues
• Burn-out
• Overwhelm

One organisation came and said they needed time management but when i dug around on the issues, there were stressed and overwhelmed people so they needed stress management to be able to focus and work more efficiently and effectively. So this is why it's important to really understand the issues.

6. Implementation

The easy bit (I like to think) is running the actual wellbeing programme. What are you doing, how is it going to run?

Are you brining someone in (like me)? I have a wealth of connections with people in menopause, finance, fitness etc so that I can help find people to support your organisation.

You also need to think about how you are communicating the programme to make it a success and make it attractive that people want to get involved in. You might have wellbeing champions who can talk about it or you share information in newsletters, team meetings and on your intranet. Posters used to work well, but at the moment with no-one in the offices, we need to think differently about this.

Some organisations run competitions and get enthusiasm going that well.

Once you get to this point, your wellbeing plan can run smoothly and it's worth putting the effort into the planning and steps 1 to 5.

7. Review

At least quarterly, if not monthly, I recommend looking at the wellbeing plan. How effective is it for your employees. Has there been an improvement from your earlier figures and needs?

Have you got a return on investment (this can be of your time, the employee time and the investment of any external people too).

That gives you a whistle-stop tour of 7 ways to create a winning wellbeing plan.

If you have any questions about this or would like some support then get in touch with me and I'd be happy to fix a call and have a chat about this in more detail.

Please do make sure you hit ‘subscribe’ so that don’t miss an episode.

If you haven’t yet left a review, please do go and find the little button to leave a review and let me know your thoughts, key take-aways and what you value from the podcast.

Join my corporate leadership and wellbeing newsletter HERE

If you want to be increasing your performance so that you’re more resilient in these current times, so that you can focus easily, use tools and techniques to deal with all the current and unknown challenges then make sure that you either drop me an email to [e-mail] . Or head over to my website and you can find the contact page and either send me a email from there or book an appointment straight into my diary – saving all that to-ing and fro-ing that you get when we try to get space in people’s diary.