Wellbeing in the workplace is a nice to have, but not business critical.
15 years ago I can share with you that is how wellbeing in the workplace was perceived.
Despite working in Human Resources at the time, wellbeing in the workplace had very little presence on the HR agenda and we certainly didn’t have the understanding that we have today about why investing in workplace wellbeing wasn’t a nice to have, it was a business critical and commercial part of the business. Fifteen years ago we had EAP lines, Occupational Health and if you were lucky, subsidised gym membership. But that was the extent of workplace wellbeing. In the 12 years working in Human Resources I never attended any employee wellbeing webinars or attended management mental health training let alone had an employee wellbeing strategy in place!
In 2011, I started to study Solution Focused Psychotherapy and Hypnotherapy. At the time I had no desire to do what I do now, but I wanted to use my time more productively and was fascinated by the human mind. About 30% of the way into my Diploma I recall having an insight about what difference it would make if we were able to provide people with some of the knowledge and information I was studying. Not with the intention of turning them into therapists you understand! I’d spent the whole weekend learning about the stress response and I was blown away about how much stress impacts our health and how little people know about this.
I had light bulbs popping away in my mind about the difference it would make to start to drip feed this knowledge to people and what an impact that understanding would have on the health of our workforce.
In one role I was HR Business Partner at Brighton and Sussex University Hospital and levels of absence and turnover were high with a continued push by the leadership team to keep targets around these down. Each month I would sit in front of a Strategy Board feeling helpless about what I could do to turn things around other than refer employees to occupational health and run more training with managers around absence management.
That moment of insight helped me to see the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle was giving people the awareness of the mind and body, mental health and how to take care of themselves.
Having seen that and feeling so fired up to take this knowledge out into organisations and into the workplace, that’s how The Mind Solution International was created 😊
Since then we have held over 10,000 one to one sessions with people so we really understand employee wellbeing from the inside out. You can discover this for yourself with our digital employee wellbeing portal!
Sara Maude, a seasoned Solution Focused Psychotherapist, Transformational Coach, Hypnotherapist, and EFT Practitioner, brings over a decade of mental health expertise to global organisations. She specialises in workplace wellbeing training, employee health and wellbeing programs and mental health training for managers. Sara’s proficiency also extends to wellbeing consultancy and wellbeing strategy, contributing significantly to the enhancement of employee wellbeing in the workplace.