More than candles and mindfulness

A variation of this conversation happens more often than you’d think:

Person 1 (at a dinner party): Paul, I hear you do wellbeing too! What do you do? 

Me (also at the dinner party, because that’s how dinner parties work): We work with organizations to find and fix the sources of employee frustration. Our wellbeing model helps us to identify where to focus our efforts so we can tackle the specific challenges that improve employee experience and organizational impact. 

Person 1 (Confused): Really? I lead the breathing exercise before our team meeting every week. And I love candles. Loooooove them!

Me: That’s great. But for us, wellbeing is more than candles and mindfulness. It’s an organization-wide-

Person 1 (walking away): How great is it that we both do wellbeing! Hey, [Person 2], you’re never gonna believe this, but me and Paul do exactly the same thing!

Because wellbeing is tricky to define, what often happens is that 1) it doesn’t get defined and remains a woolly, abstract concept that can mean anything, or 2) it defaults to a general definition of something to do with relaxing, possibly including candles, and definitely involving mindfulness.

When this definition (or lack thereof) is used, in times of plenty, teams may receive a wellbeing budget to ‘do something nice as a team’, again, possibly including candles, and definitely involving mindfulness. When economic conditions decline, so does the focus on wellbeing, and everyone waits until things get better until wellbeing can be practiced again.  

To avoid this, we developed a clear definition of wellbeing at work, based on international research and best practices.

“Wellbeing at work is when your workplace experience is positive, and you have the desire, ability, and support to attain your goals and thrive in your career.”

Wellbeing is a cumulative result of high levels on the following five components:

• Health

• Finance

• Career

• Connection

• Purpose

Using data from our w@w Employee Survey, we can discuss wellbeing in terms of a total organizational score (the sum of these five components) or as a wellbeing profile (based on the mean scores across the five components). We can also provide insights by a range of organizational and demographic variables, including by team, tenure, seniority level, age, or gender.

For us, wellbeing is more than just candles and mindfulness*. We’re very specific in how we define and measure it, so can be very specific in how we design programs that replicate and scale positive sources of wellbeing, and target and address areas that are more challenging.

If you’d like to know more about how we measure wellbeing and how it can be used to guide initiatives in your organization, use the button below to reach out. If you’d like information on candles or mindfulness, click on here or here respectively.

* For the record, I’m neither anti-candle nor anti-mindfulness! Both are fabulous, as are the people who find them to be a vital part of their own wellbeing.