Wellbeing
Wellbeing or psychological health at work is characterised by active promotion, maintenance, and sustainability of healthy psychosocial working conditions to sustain the individual’s positive mental health and ability to work productively and creatively, as well as an active prevention of poor psychosocial working conditions.
The psychological working environment
Both physical and psychological health and wellbeing at work are affected by psychosocial hazards in terms of work organisation (e.g. job content, high workload and work pace, regular overwork, lack of control, role ambiguity, role conflicts, inflexible work schedules) and interpersonal relationships at work (e.g. conflicts, harassment, bullying). The physical work environment may also directly affect our health and wellbeing: nobody likes to work in noisy or dirty workplaces or with poor working equipment.
Risks arising from psychosocial hazards can be systematically managed like any other type of risk. A healthy psychosocial work environment in terms of for example appropriate social support from leaders and peers, appropriate degree of autonomy and opportunities for learning and development can contribute positively to health and wellbeing as well as to safety.
Breaking organisational silos and barriers
In many organisations, the human resource department (HR) is in charge of supporting the development of wellbeing, while engineers or dedicated occupational safety and health (OSH) professionals are mostly involved in supporting health and safety. While HR departments have much experience in dealing with people, they are usually less experienced in systematic OSH management; likewise, OSH professionals usually have less experience with addressing the work organisation. Breaking through the various barriers of organisational silos and creating a common safety, health and wellbeing strategy implies opportunities for greater organisational effectiveness and synergies.
Wellbeing is all about balance
We can help you on different levels
You can read much more about our Vision Zero Wellbeing services by opening the boxes below.
Human House can assist your organisation in defining the current wellbeing prevention level in your organisation and guide you to the next steps for your organisation.
Human House offers:
The Vision Zero mindset is about the journey towards a higher prevention level.
This is also true for wellbeing.
Human House can assist your organisation in defining the current wellbeing prevention level in your organisation and guide you to the next steps for your organisation
- The Creating Level: Wellbeing is an integrated part of business leadership with an ongoing daily focus. There is a focus on creating the best workplace to attract and retain managers and employees.
- The Proactive Level: The organisation prioritizes wellbeing and focuses on preventing wellbeing problems before they occur.
- The Active Level: Wellbeing is said to be a priority, but there is not always consistency between words and actions in the organisation.
- The Reactive Level: The organisation only focuses on wellbeing in case of for example many stress incidents or conflicts.
- The Passive Level: Wellbeing is not a priority in the organisation.
The Vision Zero mindset is about the journey towards a higher prevention-level. This is also true for wellbeing. Human House can assist your organisation in defining the current wellbeing prevention level in your organisation and guide you to the next steps for your organisation.
- Employee evaluations of managers as role models on wellbeing (surveys).
- Frequency of wellbeing as part of department meetings or 1-1 dialogues.
- Number of risk assessments of organisational changes.
- Frequency of management follow up on reported wellbeing incidents (analysis, improvement, feedback to those involved) – for example in teams with many conflicts or constantly high workload.
- Evaluation of objectives set on selected Workplace assessment results (surveys).
- Frequency of onboarding instructions including wellbeing (for example principles for prioritisation of tasks or Company Code of Conduct).
- Frequency of start-up meetings with wellbeing on the agenda (for example workload and collaboration in the group).
- Frequency of wellbeing considerations included when investing in new IT solutions (for example requirements for complexity and learning of new processes).
- Number of education programs including wellbeing (for example stress prevention, guidelines for good manners, policies for abusive behavior - or current topics such as wellbeing in relation to Covid-19).
- Number of knowledge sharing on good wellbeing initiatives and best practices.
Human House can assist your organisation to implement Vision Zero 7 Golden rules on wellbeing.
Contact
