Unpacking Wellbeing

Wellbeing is something that is certainly the hot topic in the workplace at the moment, which has an overlap in mental health circles. With much of the same focus as mental health, wellbeing is concentrated on keeping people safe, comfortable, secure, content, happy and positive. We know this has a knock-on effect in terms of productivity and performance and is something that everyone is turning to now to keep staff content and in employment. But what does “wellbeing” mean and what areas of the workplace is it concerned with.

Happiness

Happiness is a subjective term, we are naturally going to run into trouble to demonstrate what happiness is and what it is not. Happiness to me could be cycling a bike 100km to someone else that could be unhappiness. But for the most we collectively agree what happiness is and what it is not. However someone could be happy but still have a low level of wellbeing, but mostly two of them are paired together. In other words, you cannot untie the links that wellbeing has to happiness, its almost impossible to isolate one from the other.

Positivity

With massive links between positivity in the workplace and performance and productivity, being positive is something that every workplace needs. Positivity includes having positive relationships with co-workers, a purpose and meaning in the workplace and self-acceptance. These can come when the workplace feels, trusting, secure and engaging, which sometimes is a hard task. The most difficulty in this aspect is, consistency, flash in the pans or fads will not contribute greatly to the workplace.

Physiological wellbeing

Wellbeing can be very hard to achieve when you have a cold, flu, or suffering some degree of injury or pain. But we know that people who are absent from physical pain or illness doesn’t necessarily mean they have a high standard of wellbeing. We know exercise can release endorphins (the wellbeing hormone) however not everyone can complete exercise, some people can have physical difficulties which make it very challenging for them to exercise.  However, if we promote exercise, we have a higher chance of releasing the feel-good hormones and increase wellbeing, the begging question here is “how can this be incorporated into the workplace?”

Social Wellbeing

Being included, involved, respected, and understood are just some of the criteria of social wellbeing, as well as healthy relationships with colleagues and management. This highlights the negative aspects of social wellbeing, which are isolation, exclusion, conflict in the workplace, being misunderstood and not being respected. The obvious ones here is bullying in the workplace, stigmatization of any kind and bad relationships with peers, and management. Fundamentally wellbeing is not achieved with the absence of the negative attributes of wellbeing but should be viewed more as a starting point.

Conclusion

Creating a feeling of wellbeing can be hard to achieve, in fact creating any type of feeling in someone else can be a tall order. You don’t try to be positive you just are positive, you don’t try to be happy you just are happy, do you see the problem? The main point here is you can’t force this on anyone its something that is left in front of them and hope they choose the positive direction. As the saying goes “you can lead a horse to water but can’t make them drink it”. We can create the right conditions to promote wellbeing and hope that people choose correctly. However, if the culture of the organisation promotes a healthy can-do attitude, it’s going to have a knock-on effect on wellbeing when its promoted