Practising What We Preach - Staff Wellbeing at Healthy Minds

With the launch of Healthy Minds' new workplace wellbeing support project, Calderdale Wellbeing Services, we have conducted our own in-house workplace wellbeing audit. As an organisation whose aim is “better mental health for everyone in Calderdale,” we’ve always known that our staff are included within that.

Alongside the launch of CWS, we wanted to ensure that we were asking businesses to invest in the wellbeing of their staff using techniques we had tried for ourselves. Therefore, in November 2022 an anonymous online survey about staff wellbeing at Healthy Minds was shared with all staff.

Across thirteen questions, we found that 79% of staff felt that Healthy Minds cares for their wellbeing. While this was an overall positive response, we wanted to go deeper. Therefore in 2023, we began conducting in-person conversations about workplace wellbeing with as many staff members as possible. These conversations focused mainly on areas where staff wanted change at work e.g., keeping the office uncluttered or looking at how new staff are introduced to the organisation.

The opportunity to have open, non-judgmental conversations has led to a twenty-two-page report encompassing what staff like and where they would like change within Healthy Minds. It has also given the senior leadership team the opportunity to respond to these needs.

By experiencing the process of a wellbeing audit, we were able to understand what it will feel like for other organisations to go through this experience. It has also created an honest and safe space where staff’s opinions and experiences are heard and respected. Finally, it allows Healthy Minds to continue to grow as an organisation. We are now in the process of creating a Wellbeing Policy which will enshrine workplace wellbeing and ensure that our experience of this audit is very much the beginning of a process.

With a service such as CWS we are comfortable practising the systems and experiences that we encourage others to do in their own workplace and we continue to strive to create workplaces of wellbeing across Calderdale - starting with ourselves.

Thank you to Kiah Hamilton-Adams for her dedicated work on this project, and for contributing this article.

Learn more about Calderdale Wellbeing Services