Since the start of the pandemic, in particular, the concept of well-being has been bandied about across all levels of the media, the government, and the community. But why is it important in a workplace context, and how should it be applied? These are some of the questions that have been bothering Paul Wilding, the Director of Employee Relations at the Department of Education in Western Australia. In a word, he says that well-being “is really about flourishing. It is about being comfortable, healthy, happy, feeling well and well connected, having good physical health, financial stability, a good mood, good family circumstances, and a good social life.” Not all of these things are required to have good well-being, but all of them contribute to it. Most importantly though, the one thing that is key is “having potential, or having some control over one’s life and having a sense of purpose.” In a work sense, in particular, this means feeling “safe, healthy and pleasant,” and for HR or other managers, it is about “focussing on those preventative actions that reduce the incidents of stress, injury or feelings of being overwhelmed.”

At the Department of Education in WA, this comes from understanding the employees and having years of experience with HR. The Department looks after “800 independent schools spread across the biggest state of Australia, with 40,000 FTE staff, 320,000 students, and a $3.8 billion net cost of service.” Till now COVID-19 was essentially at bay, but in early 2022 it has finally arrived “so we are dealing with that in about 500 of our schools.” However, both before and during the pandemic, it became clear that with so many schools, students and staff, it was not possible to please everyone, so there is always an HR balance between “organisational systems versus individual outcomes. We can’t address the individual issues of every employee in a well-being sense, so we have to establish organisational systems that need to be clearly defined.” In a workplace sense, this means looking after a number of issues, sometimes simultaneously:

• Information – “One of the biggest issues we all face is that there’s just too much information.” Social media feeds “are full of pictures of people on yoga mats telling us what the secret to well-being is.” This can be distracting. What is needed instead “is to move beyond those modes of communication by talking about well-being as a practice of HR.”
• Hard vs Soft – In that sense, “HR is either hard or soft.” Hard refers to the “things we have to deal with on a daily basis,” from workers comp and injury management to bullying and physical health conditions. Soft on the other hand refers to the “things that create a sense of purpose,” from healthy eating to stuff on the internet. “We need to get that balance right but often we are not good at that.”
• Mental vs Physical – Overall well-being is really about both the mental and physical health of a person, but in recent years and since the pandemic, “physical has well and truly been overtaken by mental health concerns.” This is not necessarily a bad thing, since “many things are related to the psychological well-being of staff,” but again, “there needs to be a balance there.”
• Traction vs KPIs / small step improvements vs a revolution – “The greatest way to be ignored as an HR practitioner in the well-being space is to put lots of words into a strategy that doesn’t deliver a thing.” For instance, the simple step of giving everyone a laptop or a tablet rather than a desktop – even if they are expected to work in the office – gives staff a sense of flexibility and an expectation that they are not bound to their desks. “These sorts of things are much more important than some of the grandiose ways of thinking.”
• Real data vs interest groups – Real data should dictate practice but often it doesn’t. As an example at the Department of Education, there are many cases of staff slipping and falling, “or being hit with a flying object.” But preventing those incidents is often “eclipsed by those groups of individuals who may have a greater presence. As such, there is usually an emphasis on the school principals and their well-being within the school system to the detriment of looking after the real injuries in schools, and their causes.”
• The OSH approach – Occupational health and safety are clearly important, but often there are too many standards or rules that come with following that approach too closely, and thus well-being often misses out. “I would suggest that rather than focus too much on the KPIs, you should look at the individual outcomes that you want to create.”