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Design of Better Work
Design work – and the work environment – to make it easier for people to work well
- Promote factors that enhance wellbeing and mitigate factors that cause harm
- Create a physically and mentally healthy workplace
- Ensure that your people thrive and your organisation succeeds
The cost of the working unwell
Wellbeing is an issue for every workplace and every senior leader.
Work can support people’s wellbeing (e.g., providing social connection, a sense of achievement, etc.). But work can also harm people’s wellbeing – and this harm is growing due to modern work practices.
Poor wellbeing can cost organisations dearly, while a physically and mentally healthy workplace sets the stage for success.
Traditionally, organisations have dealt with wellbeing at work by responding only when issues arise and focusing on supporting or ‘fixing’ the workers involved.
Imagine if we took that approach to safety.
Imagine if we only responded after someone got hurt, focused on rehabilitating them, but never took any preventative steps to avoid incidents happening in the first place? No one would consider that acceptable.
A far better approach – and one that meets your legal obligations to protect workers – is to proactively design a workplace that protects people from harm to both their physical and mental health.
The cost of the working unwell:
- The global economy loses approximately US$ 1 trillion per year in productivity due to depression and anxiety (World Health Organization, 2019).
- One in five New Zealanders live with mental illness and/or addiction (New Zealand Mental Health and Addition Services, 2018).
- One in six New Zealand adults have been diagnosed with a common mental disorder at some time in their lives (New Zealand Health Survey, 2016/2017).
Wellbeing is an individual’s ongoing state which enables the person to thrive or not (British Safety Council).
Wellbeing is universal (we all have it), subjective (individuals can react to circumstances differently), and dynamic (our state of wellbeing changes).
Thriving people power successful organisations
Investing in your leadership capability and confidence – and in your own wellbeing – is the key to fostering a stronger, more engaged health and safety culture and improving your organisation’s health and safety performance. Know that, through your leadership, you’ve played your part in ensuring your people thrive and your organisation succeeds. How would that feel?
Obligation creates opportunity
Creating work – and a workplace environment – that supports people to thrive is about more than just avoiding or mitigating the cost of the working unwell. People who are thriving are more likely to create – and get after – opportunities to contribute and make a meaningful difference in your organisation.
Thriving means feeling and functioning well across multiple domains of life, enabling one to:
- Be confident in oneself and have positive self-esteem,
- Feel and express a range of emotions,
- Build and maintain good relationships with others,
- Feel engaged with the world around you,
- Live and work productively,
- Cope with the stresses of daily life, and
- Adapt and manage in times of change and uncertainty.
Helping you to help your people thrive
In a world flooded with leadership and wellbeing products, our offering stands out as unique.
We have developed processes and programmes that support senior leaders to take a dramatically different, and much more effective, approach to protecting and enhancing wellbeing at work. While traditional wellbeing strategies tend to focus on ‘fixing’ workers by building resilience, our services support leaders to identify and fix problems with the work itself that can harm people’s wellbeing.
We show leaders how they can:
- Protect and enhance wellbeing, and
- Design physically and mentally healthy workplaces.
We work with directors, CEOs, and executives, enabling them to meet their legal obligations regarding wellbeing at work. We also enable them to leverage the opportunities that open up for leaders who step into this space to ensure their people and organisations thrive.
Senior leaders in New Zealand and Australia we’ve worked with are already experiencing the benefits of this next wave of health and safety leadership.
Our services and programmes to help you design better work include:
Brains first, and then Hard Work.