How to make wellbeing in the workplace stick

“We are having a wellbeing at work week” said a Learning and Development Manager to me when talking about her organisations wellbeing strategy.

“Great” I replied “what happens after that?”

“Well we’ll probably do the same thing again next year”.

I’ll share with you what I shared with her if you really want your wellbeing initiates to stick – be consistent.

Running a series of talks over the space of a week, or even a month is wonderful (because if you are already doing something similar to that, then you are already way ahead of the game!), however in relation to how the human brain works, it’s a bit like throwing jelly against the wall and hoping that it sticks.

Instead, I’d like to invite you to just stop for a minute and to just think about how your organisation markets itself. Now, I don’t know whether you’re marketing a product or a service, whether you do that through digital marketing or whether you do that through radio or advertising on television, but I’m fairly sure that whatever it is that you’re promoting, you don’t just do it once.

And that’s because your marketing team know and understand that in order to really stick in the human brain, the human brain needs to hear something more than once. In fact, the human brain needs to hear something between about 7 and 15 times for it to form a connection.


I wonder if you were to take that principle of marketing into your wellbeing strategy what impact that would have?

I see a lot of organisations that are doing some brilliant stuff where wellbeing is concerned. They’re running campaigns. They may be running a wellbeing week or even a wellbeing month.

But the information that they’re effectively marketing to employees, whether that’s about stress or pressure or mindfulness or gut health, they’re doing it once and therefore we know at a scientific level that although it’s brilliant information, unless people hear that kind of information again and again and again, it’s likely that probably about at least 80% of that information is going to be forgotten about in a couple of days time.

So in order for your wellbeing strategy to really stick in the minds of your employees, to the degree that you are starting to create shifts in behaviour, then I invite you to follow those marketing principles.


And that’s exactly what we did at The Mind Solution. We recognised from working with people on a one-to-one level for years that in order to create behavioural change, employees need to hear something again and again.

They need to be able to access information and tools and techniques consistently. Just like Aristotle said, that excellence is merely a habit.

So when you’re giving your employees what they need consistently, you’re drip feeding that information. That’s where you’re going to see real change in the workplace.

To achieve that we’ve created our digital wellbeing portal so that your employees have got access to that information. We feed them the information that they need consistently to be at their best mentally, keeping wellbeing at the forefront of their mind – just like marketing!

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