The theme for the day was the employee experience through the lens of resilience and wellbeing. After an opportunity to say hello, mingle and a check-in we reminded ourselves about the theme of this year ‘Resilience as a Gateway to Sustainability’ as well as the work we had done on visions in March and our resilience and wellbeing whole person model.
As we were using the steps of the Oasis Seven Stage Model, we had a high-level run through of the model. We were not necessarily looking for answers but for good questions to take us on this journey.
Starting to map the experience, we worked in four groups, two working on contacting and two on contracting.
Contacting
We worked with questions around recruitment. How does external branding communicate how you work? How do you conduct interviews in a whole person way? How do you communicate/engage in-between? How do you get across your ways of working and what do they say about you as a company looking to be proactive around employee wellbeing?
Contracting
The two groups working with contracting looked at the negotiation/agreement part of the employee journey. How do you welcome new employees into the organisation? How do you set expectations? How do you do this in a way that supports people’s whole person approach to wellbeing; physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and creative.
After the break we looked at the next three steps of the 7 Stage Model: Clarifying, Challenging and Choosing.
The two groups working with Clarifying looked at questions around settling in. This is where an employee would meet the team and the wider business, start to build new relationships and learn how things are done. A stage when potentially emotional wellbeing could be triggered the most.
For Challenging and Choosing the groups discussed: What happens when difficulties arise? How do we deal with awkward relationships, failure, poor performance? What opportunities are there for development, growth and learning? How do we assess wellbeing needs? How does all this affect someone’s stress levels? Whats the responsibility of the business and what’s the responsibility of the employee?
In the final part of the day we looked at Changing. Change could be promotion, demotion, redundancy or leaving. A new manager might be appointed. New responsibilities might be needed for the role. There could be a merger or a new CEO who wants to change the status quo. How do we work with change in a whole person way? What impact does that have on our health?
And for Closing: If someone leaves what is the experience we want to create? When a project finishes how do we review and evaluate? Paying attention to a good way of bringing the work and relationship to a close is as important as the Contacting stage. As they say, how we begin is usually how we end, a chaotic messy start will encourage a chaotic messy ending.
Our sessions are co-created with you so we really value all the feedback we receive about the network and the forum.
What we gathered this time was that people value the time and space to share ideas and best practice, hearing about what other people have done, and the openness of contributors and opportunities to learn from others.
What you said you wanted more of/improvements: a greater mix of roles within an organisation. Some of you are bringing along colleagues who are not as directly engaged with wellbeing or people responsibilities – this is great! More of this please! It will help you engage everybody across your organisation with wellbeing and bring a greater spread of voices and ideas to the network.
More companies with high numbers of staff – we’d like this too! We’re always open to speaking to companies interested in joining the network. If you think of any that would be a good fit, let us know. Even better, if you have a contact somewhere that you can introduce us to, get in touch!
More case study content and gathering ideas from other companies: we will work on this as best we can and please do remember to have a look in Basecamp, as already there are several case studies from guest speakers we’ve had in previous years.
We’d like our next session to be a useful and productive session with lots of contributions, stories and best practices – and we recognise we can’t cover everyting in the time we have, but we’ll do our best. Leave it with us!
