Celebrating 100 Episodes
Lessons for Leaders
Welcome to Lessons for Leaders. Can you believe it’s episode 100? The goal has always been to share lessons, learnings, tips and advice and even when things got tough with it, I’ve enjoyed it more and I’m proud to be able to say I got to 100. Many of my regular listeners will know that my girls are the reason I do what I do and my eldest girl is about to make me a Granny next month so it seems like a good time to pause the episodes for a while. This last one is a very special episode, with my other amazing girl joining me at the mic to ask some of the questions you, my listeners...
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How to Persuade Leaders to Invest in Wellbeing
Lessons for Leaders
This week I'm sharing top tips and conversations that I have frequently with people in organisations to help them know how to persuade leaders to invest in wellbeing. We're covering: What to do to persuade your leaders The 3 R’s that I like to go with organisations I work with. Why we need to look at revenue in different ways and I dive into specifics here to give you a head start. How to highlight the risks to an organisation Why it’s important to include reputation in this persuasive detail too. It’s easy to say wellbeing can help to reverse employee burnout and reduce stress,...
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Why a Good Leader Will Give Teams Autonomy
Lessons for Leaders
This week I'm joined by Gemma Woodward who is People & Culture Manager for Netsells in York. We are talking about leadership and autonomy. Listen in for: What are the benefits of allowing autonomy. How leaders can encourage autonomy in their teams. Where leaders get it wrong with a top down leadership and how it can affect their people and the organisation what's one key thing that people should remember about autonomy Key comments and take-aways A top down leadership can create a fear of coming forward and fear of making mistake, their ideas and decisions might...
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Why Leaders Need to Get Back to the Floor
Lessons for Leaders
What on earth is back to the floor? I start with that and why I'm covering the subject (it was inspired by my wonderful friend and leader Tina. So I'm also covering today: Why is it important to know first hand what’s happening on your shop floor Some real life examples and stories of how back to floor worked, and how it didn’t One really, really important question to ask yourself I share stories from my experience in corporate and Tina's feedback too to give real life examples - some are funny, some are lovely, one is a little shocking! Here's one of the key things .......
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Why it's Worth Investing in Stress Awareness
Lessons for Leaders
This week on the podcast I'm talking about Why it's Worth Investing in Stress Awareness. I wonder if you've ever had a time when you've ever felt stressed and known what would help ... but not bothered to do it???? This is just one of the reason why I'm sharing information that can help you make a decision on whether it's worth investing in stress awareness. I cover: What is causing Stress in the workplace? How Will Stress Awareness Help Your Organisation? How Does Stress Impact Productivity? Is it Worth Investing in Stress Awareness? Ways I can support you or help for you to do...
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Lockdown Lessons for Leaders
Lessons for Leaders
Two years since the UK locked down from the Covid 19 virus. In fact pretty much the world locked down. It changed so many things About how we live How we work Connections & communication Wellbeing – what were thankful for – fear / perspective Resilience Have you looked back at those pictures from cities that were empty and streets that were bare? I know I have. There were bits that I loved, bits I didn’t love. There was a significant difference in how people viewed the lockdown. Some loved it. Some hated it. For some it was...
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Supporting Female Leaders
Lessons for Leaders
In honour of International Women's Day, I’m here to give ideas of ways that you can support women in leadership roles. There can be a number of reasons why there are less women than men in leadership roles. Data from the House of Commons found that companies led by women outperform those led by men - but despite this, we're very far from achieving gender parity in the workplace I share information about Break the Bias Unconscious biases, opinions, beliefs are formed early in our childhood. We learn these from family, friends, people of authority that are social...
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Why Empathy is Crucial for Great Leaders
Lessons for Leaders
This week I'm talking to you about why empathy is crucial for great leaders. I cover : What is empathy Why does it matter in leadership Whether empathy can be learned How it can improve performance, create connections and What you can do to be more empathic. Why empathy is crucial for great leaders and what is empathy anyway? Empathy is the ability to experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions, or experience of others. So it's about truly feeling what the other person is feeling. You know I often talk about how we don't 'do' emotions. But empathy is about...
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Easy Ways to Say No
Lessons for Leaders
Do you find it difficult to say no to people? Perhaps it means you end up being busy, stressed, over-committed? Often when we struggle to say no to people it can leave us feeling used, put up-on, juggling too many things. Are you the one who ends up working late because you’ve said yes to others, yet you’re the one with more to do? This episode is for you where I talk about Say no and establish healthy boundaries How to handle the fear, stress, worry and guilt The surprising reason that saying no is good for you Key phrases that you can begin to use to get...
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De-stigmatizing Mental Health
Lessons for Leaders
This week I'm sharing tips and information about De-stigmatizing Mental Health. I share key points on: Why mental health is stigmatized How stigma brings shame and what that looks like How it will impact on your organisation Good news on the wider impact of investing in destigmatizing Key things that you can do and examples too When we prevent people talking openly and transparently we also prevent those who need it from having support. Stigma brings shame. Listen in for information about how people respond then feel ashamed and what the impact will be...
info_outline7 Steps to a Winning Wellbeing Plan
This week I'm talking about the 7 steps that you can take to create winning wellbeing plans in your organisation and sharing exactly what would be good things so that there are not just knee jerk reactions and plugging gaps.
A quick run down of the 7 Steps to Winning Wellbeing areas we look at in the episode will be:
- Issues
- Needs
- Benefits
- Barriers
- Creating the Plan
- Implementation
- Review
I'm talking to HR and Wellbeing leads who are looking at the wellbeing plans for their organisations and with the pandemic it has become more important to look at and support people in organisations.
I've created these 7 steps to winning wellbeing during the time I've spent working with organisations.
1. Issues
You need to know what's going on, what you need to fix and what issues you have that you already know about. Is it high absence, people not talking or something else.
Think about why you are creating this wellbeing plan so that you are delivering things that are helpful for people.
Do you have senior leadership buy-in - because this is important.
2. Identify
You really need to ask your people. Whilst I can say what's going on with trends and issues with organisations, but if you want to hit the spot you need to ask your people. It also builds trust, they feel listened to and that they are valued.
This can be done with questionnaires (I have one) or you can run your own, buy in packages or have me create and deliver for you.
Run focus groups (or I can run them for you!) and you can be listening to employees and ask where they are struggling (this is one of the first questions I ask on my webinars.
What team do you have around you - is there MHFA, EAP, OH or wellbeing champions? What are the policies in your organisation already - are there others that you want and need?
Who is responsibility in your organisation, do you have budget and what return on investment is needed?
3. Benefits
Think about the benefits that this wellbeing plan will bring to the organisation.
It might be benefits to the employer in reducing absences or attrition. It might be benefits to the employee with a boost of morale, helping them to be happier, healthier (all of these have an employer impact).
It might be about improving performance or all sorts of other reasons and then when you have these 3 plans, then the benefits will be part of the communication plan that will encourage people to be involved.
4. Barriers
Looks at the barriers to success. If you haven't got leadershp buy-in then it's likely to be a barrier for you.
How are people feeling?
Will you make these trainings mandatory or voluntary?
Will you be raising the question about the stigma of mental health? How will you be careful that people don't feel ashamed of their difficulties?
Make sure you're not doing too much too soon and throwing all things at people or mixing too many different topics and subjects. If you do this it will create confusion and people won't know what 'thing' to do first.
So it's important that you look at where the barriers are to ensure that your winning wellbeing plan is successful.
5. Creating Your Winning Wellbeing Plan
When you create your actual programme, look at how it's going to work and what it will look like. Whether that is about having a monthly focus, doing things yourself, brining in people with expertise, using webinars, lunch and learn sessions, half day workshops, group coaching, 1;1 coaching is all part of the options you have.
Monthly themes that I work with are:
- Stress and anxiety
- Resilience
- Mens health
- Menopause (listen how this isn't just a women's issue)
- Mental health (both support people, and helping themselves)
- Working well fro home
- Creating connections
- Self care
- Fitness
- Sleep issues
- Burn-out
- Overwhelm
One organisation came and said they needed time management but when i dug around on the issues, there were stressed and overwhelmed people so they needed stress management to be able to focus and work more efficiently and effectively. So this is why it's important to really understand the issues.
6. Implementation
The easy bit (I like to think) is running the actual wellbeing programme. What are you doing, how is it going to run?
Are you brining someone in (like me)? I have a wealth of connections with people in menopause, finance, fitness etc so that I can help find people to support your organisation.
You also need to think about how you are communicating the programme to make it a success and make it attractive that people want to get involved in. You might have wellbeing champions who can talk about it or you share information in newsletters, team meetings and on your intranet. Posters used to work well, but at the moment with no-one in the offices, we need to think differently about this.
Some organisations run competitions and get enthusiasm going that well.
Once you get to this point, your wellbeing plan can run smoothly and it's worth putting the effort into the planning and steps 1 to 5.
7. Review
At least quarterly, if not monthly, I recommend looking at the wellbeing plan. How effective is it for your employees. Has there been an improvement from your earlier figures and needs?
Have you got a return on investment (this can be of your time, the employee time and the investment of any external people too).
That gives you a whistle-stop tour of 7 ways to create a winning wellbeing plan.
If you have any questions about this or would like some support then get in touch with me and I'd be happy to fix a call and have a chat about this in more detail.
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If you want to be increasing your performance so that you’re more resilient in these current times, so that you can focus easily, use tools and techniques to deal with all the current and unknown challenges then make sure that you either drop me an email to [email protected] . Or head over to my website and you can find the contact page and either send me a email from there or book an appointment straight into my diary – saving all that to-ing and fro-ing that you get when we try to get space in people’s diary.