CWHP-A Reflections: Unit WWC00

There are so many great take aways from Unit 1, but there was a very clear sentence in the book, A Better Place to Work that really struck me: “A person’s performance at work is largely tied to whether they feel supported and appreciated by their organization”. So simple!!

Employees who are not well, do not perform optimally. Before this course, although I’d included performance in my Wellness Strategy’s business case, I think that’s where the focus should have been. I did not have good senior leader buy-in and I think focussing on performance will help change that.

Secondly, if we want wellness to help improve performance, we need to change the culture. Intuitively, I understood this, but I didn’t know how to articulate it so that it was meaningful to leaders. Performance is the key.

Just as our culture is changing in our Directorate to ensure we take accessibility and D&I into account in everything we do, so too should we be using our wellness lens because it matters in terms of employee performance.

Going forward, I need to work closer with leaders to consider making decisions based not only on perfecting a quality customer experience, but also creating a quality employee experience—but again, to improve performance. This is an approach I think senior leaders can embrace.

I’m already changing what I’m doing. In November, we’re having our second annual WellaPalooza (wellness fair). It’s a one-day virtual event with speakers throughout the day. The biggest complaint we had last year was that many people couldn’t attend (or could attend very little) because they had meetings all day and the workload was such that it would have caused to much stress to attend (not what we were going for!)

This year, we’re doing two things differently:

1. We’re holding it over 3 afternoons so staff can pick and choose what seminars they can go to, based on their schedules and workload.

2. We’ve engaged the Assistant Commissioner and the Directorate General to ask leaders to please not hold meetings on those afternoons (if they can help it) so staff can attend.