About Got
Got a Wellbeing Week coming up? Don’t know where to start or what activities to offer? Want to do something different with a real long-term impact?
Wellbeing is front of mind for many organisations, using Wellbeing Weeks/Months as a way to engage people and build awareness. However, coming up with the activities and promotional events that are impactful and cost effective can be difficult.
As speakers and specialists on the topic of emotional and psychological wellbeing, we can support your Wellbeing Week in a range of ways – including delivering ‘drop-in’ style workshops designed around the pillars of positive psychological wellbeing to enable flourishing and thriving (i.e. PERMA+R model, for any positive psychology geeks out there!). We have something to suit every budget and agenda.
Speaking and Mini-Sessions
• Interactive Speaking Presentation: Introduce the PERMA+R model that supports flourishing and builds resilience. Includes a quick exercise around the key foundations of wellbeing and practical tips to strengthen our own and others’ engagement and wellbeing. See us in action!
• Wellbeing Team Conversations: Facilitated workshop working around the Wellbeing Conversation Mat, groups are encouraged to articulate what each pillar means to them, how they experience it at work and at home, and defined actions to strengthen wellbeing for all. These can be delivered for small or large groups (up to 200) and usually take around 2-3 hours.
Workshop Series
Workshops are 45mins long and can be run simultaneously or back-to-back throughout the day. People have the opportunity to learn the skills and techniques to support each pillar of positive psychological wellbeing:
• Sustaining Positive Emotions: This session explores the differences between ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’. We look at how happiness contributes to wellbeing, and the benefits of cultivating positive emotions.
• Creating Engagement: In this workshop, we discover some of our core ‘strengths’ – things we excel at and are energised by. We also explore Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’ – a state of ‘losing ourselves’ in a task – which has a positive effect on our wellbeing, and most often occurs when we use our strengths.
• Developing Positive Relationships: This workshop explores the importance and benefits of relationships at work. Based on the work of Jane Dutton, we explore three methods – trust, task enabling and respectful engagement – to build ‘high quality connections’.
• Finding Meaning: This session is the deepest and most thought-provoking of the series, exploring what makes life worthwhile. In line with the work of Viktor Frankl, we look at ways to experience and create purpose in our lives.
• Encouraging Achievement: In this session, we look at the benefits of an optimistic mindset, and how this can be developed to increase our sense of achievement
• Building Resilience: This session draws our learning together to relate it specifically to stress. We look at the neuroscience of threat, and how we can minimise our negative emotions and behaviours in difficult situations.
We also offer a range of products and tools, including Wellbeing Notebooks and Conversations mats. To purchase these directly via our online shop click here.
Our products and workshops are a proactive approach to support wellbeing that gives people the skills and techniques so they are better equipped to handle all of life’s challenges. Based on the PERMA+R model of wellbeing we empower people to be their best selves and flourish and thrive.
For more information on how we can support wellbeing more broadly email us at info@baileyandfrench.com or call +44 1273 830 830.
About The
Stress is the leading cause of workplace absence in the UK. In response, ‘wellbeing’ is on the agenda for the majority of people teams (only 8% of organisations say they’re not doing anything to improve employee health and wellbeing). But in reality, many of these programmes focus on physical health and support for those with mental illness, rather than true psychological wellbeing for all people (CIPD, 2016).
For many people professionals, wellbeing is a new area of responsibility, and an addition to an already-heavy workload of existing HR processes and priorities. It is high on the organisational agenda, but often perceived sceptically by people across the organisation, who are focused on the day-to-day tasks of the business, and unconvinced of the value of the activities on offer.
There is frequently a lack of clarity around what ‘wellbeing’ means and what the expectations and outcomes are for programmes – it simply becomes another thing for HR to do, reinforcing their role as the ‘parents’ of the organisation. Programmes repeatedly fall to more junior members of the team, who have a lack of influence and find it difficult to get people on board.
The result is a high workload and confusion around where to start, which can lead to programmes never getting off the ground. Even those that do are less successful than they should be, or unhelpfully lead to a culture of entitlement, where people feel it’s down to the organisation – and the people team in particular – to look after them. There’s a lack of real engagement and a mentality that it’s down to someone else – again, often the people team – to ‘fix’ things.
So, what options do we have if we really want to improve wellbeing within our organisations? Martin Seligman’s PERMA model provides a simple, research-based framework, which we’ve used to create a flexible programme that easily adjusts to fit small single-site organisations, large multi-nationals, and everything in between.
Initiated by a simple conversation mat tool (see this article for more details), it focuses on a series of six wellbeing workshops. At just an hour long, these are easy to fit into the working day – often over a breakfast or lunch – and built around interactive activities to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own wellbeing. These can be run in-person or virtually through online learning – either by the Bailey & French team or by internal champions, who we can upskill through a train the trainer session. Using an innovative preventative approach, they’re interactive and fun – using conversation and reflection to encourage active peer-to-peer learning and exploration – and making wellbeing easy for everyone to understand and apply on both an individual and organisational level.
For more information on our wellbeing programmes, including our wellbeing conversation mat, workshops and notebooks please email us or call +44 1273 830 830.
Amy Parker
