Case Study
Team Wellbeing
Client: Young Minds
Cause: Young People's Mental Health
The Challenge
"We LOVE wellbeing at Young Minds. But like most in the charity sector we are far better at looking after other people’s wellbeing than taking our own advice!!!
The team are really, really tired. One of them was saying to me that they’ve: “washed and rewashed my resilience superhero outfit so often that it’s getting threadbare”.
And this is coming through with their ability to manage workload, early signs of increasing sick leave, the scenario where they go on annual leave and come back having spent the entire time asleep and still feel tired.
And of course there is still so much to do and we can’t recruit quickly enough to get all the resource in we actually need – and in a small team of 15 they are reluctant to let anything go or pass it on to colleagues.
All of this is I’m sure super familiar?? We're looking for some external help to identify and tackle the things we haven't done.
Is this something you might be interested in getting involved with?"
The Work
we did
We were delighted to be approached by this brilliant charity. They already had many of the "usual" wellbeing elements covered - team tea breaks, daily check-ins, wellbeing days, lunchtime yoga, Employee Assist Programme etc - but what they hadn't covered was the mindset work behind this. Staff were well aware these things were on offer but they weren't being used. And what's more, they didn't feel they should take them. They were comparing their own wellbeing to the wellbeing of their beneficiaries, and dismissing it. They could see how much pressure everyone was under and didn't want to add to it by admitting they were struggling and asking for change or help.
In response we created a project which included: sessions on the basics of wellbeing and self-care and their impact on your ability to perform at your best (in any areas of life), a wellbeing audit and survey and identified the main causes of challenge to wellbeing; one-to-one conversations with every team member to ensure all of the challenges had been heard and understood; team sessions to discuss how they would like to see things changed and improved; and created a wellbeing tool-kit to help identify, acknowledge and start to tackle some of the key challenges and stressors and delivered this as a physical book and in an in-person delivered session to explain how it was to be used. We also created a separate resource for Managers, to help them to support their team members (and each other) in increasing their commitment to wellbeing and in using the tools provided
The Outcome
“Claire helped us appreciate that wellbeing and improved delivery are the same thing. Investing and paying attention to staff wellbeing is not about the yoga and free fruit – she showed us how by investing time and focus in wellbeing we could create a higher performing team. Through Claire’s insight and focus on wellbeing the team delivered a 95% growth on income in a particularly challenging and under-staffed year
Claire provides the perfect balance of sensitive challenge and support – at the end of the project every single team member reported improvement in their own wellbeing, and that the process had supported personal development.”
Vanessa Longley
Former Director of Development
Young Minds