Is your firm’s wellbeing like a stick of Blackpool Rock (no, we don’t mean sweet, sticky and bad for your teeth)???
The problem with wellbeing initiatives is that most of them are a bit, well, airy fairy!
Concepts and principles. Charters.
Broad-brush values statements and policies that bear little relation to the often harsh reality of legal practice.
The outcome? These documents (often trumpeted about by firms’ PR machines) have a detrimental effect on wellbeing.
People lose heart at the disconnect between theory and reality in their organisations.
This is where TCC (The Carvalho Consultancy) comes in!
We tell it like it is. Because we’ve walked in your shoes.
How do we avoid this pointless window dressing?
1. Ditch the term ‘wellbeing’. Use ‘mental health’ or ‘corporate health’ instead.
‘Wellbeing’ creates a false impression that everyone should be skipping around deliriously happy all the time.
‘Corporate health’ indicates something important: that ‘wellbeing’ should be looked at through a team and firm lens.
This is not an individual endeavour.
If you take an individualistic approach to wellbeing, that leads to the false assumption that it’s all about me leaving at 6pm to go to my yoga class.
Whereas a team-based approach leads to nuanced conversations about the impact on the team if someone leaves to go to yoga at 6pm in the middle of an important deal while everyone else has to stay to finish the work that needs to be done. About balancing everyone’s needs.
2. Treat wellbeing like a stick of rock
As we like to say, mental health should run like the words through a stick of Blackpool Rock through everything else in your organisation. It’s not just about standalone wellbeing policies.
An example…
At the moment, we’re having a great time designing some training with one firm.
At its best, providing training involves us getting under a firm’s skin a bit (in a non-creepy/horror film-esque way).
So we’re looking at their policies, yes, about wellbeing, but also about other aspects of their firm’s life, including supervision, amongst other areas.
*Applied wellbeing* is about looking at mental health in real-life situations e.g. when it comes into conflict with other considerations.
…a junior team member who you are supervising and who is not performing well but who then discloses some mental health issues to you…
…a senior colleague who several team-mates have complained about due to their bad tempered-ness and irritability. And yet you have also heard rumours that he/she is having troubles at home and you suspect that the changes in them indicate something deeper going on.
The training will tackle these scenarios, apply the policies and face those difficult situations head-on. So, the policies are brought to life and imprinted in people’s minds!
If you want to take an intelligent and applied approach to wellbeing, get in touch