Wellbeing strategy development

Goal setting and strategy

Regardless of your organisation’s size or industry, developing a strategy is likely to involve collaboration with multiple stakeholders. Groups that may be involved in this process include functional areas such as health and safety, human resources, and people and culture. It may also include employees who are interested in championing the promotion of mental health and well-being in the organisation, regardless of their role.

Set your overarching goal: Where do you want to get to? The big thing you want to achieve.

 Set a series of objectives: A little reverse engineering comes into play here – look at what the ideal outcome or result could be.

For example, no more ad-hoc employee sick days could be:

Objective – reduce employee absenteeism.

Then develop the key strategies: What you will need to do to get there.
The top line items of actions/activities that can be done to achieve the objectives and reach the goal.

For example, Objective – reduce employee absenteeism:

Strategy – address mental health challenges such as stress, burnout, and related issues to help decrease absenteeism.

Action planning

Your next stage will require you to convert your strategy to an actionable plan.

This is the implementation: All the actual ‘how’ things to put into action and undertake within each strategy.

Converting your wellbeing strategy to concrete activities will help you maintain focus and momentum.

Your action planning focus should be guided by your goal and strategies.

For example,

• Objective – reduce employee absenteeism:
• Strategy – address mental health challenges such as stress, burnout, and related issues to help decrease absenteeism.
• Actions – ensure work resources (physical and material) match task demands in order to alleviate possible pain points and reduce stress on the team.

Monitor and review

Monitoring the outcomes of your mental health and well-being activities will be critical to ensuring the long-term success of your mental health strategy.

Tracking outcomes can help:

• support the long-term buy-in of all the team.
• demonstrate the impact on wellbeing.
• monitor activities and practices that can affect mental health; and
• respond more effectively to problems or concerns in employee mental health.

A simple approach to developing a strategy is to look at:

Tools to help guide planning

Developing a personal workplace wellbeing plan can help you to stay well at work.

It will help you identify the things that keep you well, your personal signs, and the coping strategies that work for you.

There are many options and templates available. Here’s a selection for you to refer to and use in creating your own wellbeing plan.