Ever wondered why high quality, proven wellbeing initiatives can work in one organisation but fail in another? The new book “Achieving Sustainable Workplace Wellbeing” by members of the Evolve Workplace Wellbeing team offers academic insight into issues of implementation, i.e. how workplace wellbeing initiatives are delivered, promoted and integrated into businesses.
The book is part of the series ‘Aligning Perspectives on Health, Safety and Wellbeing’ published by Springer and is available as a PDF or e-book via relevant university subscriptions, or a hard copy book to purchase.
Many businesses hope to improve or at least sustain the wellbeing of their employees. However, we know that a sizeable proportion of workplace wellbeing initiatives still fail to produce noticeable benefits due to how they are implemented. It can be hard to judge why this is.
Businesses exist in context and rarely implement one initiative, test and judge if it has been successful, before moving on to try another initiative. Instead, they often create packages or programmes of workplace wellbeing activities with overlapping purposes and potential outcomes.
Very few studies have ever examined the context in which these types of package or programme can flourish – yet these are exactly the real life activities covered in the book.
The authors – Professor Kevin Daniels, Professor Olga Tregaskis, Dr Rachel Nayani and Dr David Watson of the University of East Anglia – hope to provide a platform to enable other workplace wellbeing researchers to understand how initiatives and programmes of activities are influenced by and influence the organization within which they are embedded.
They offer a model of processes that sustain workplace wellbeing approaches that focuses on:
- Learning
- Adaptation
- Continuity
and develop an overarching view of how organisations resolve tensions between workplace wellbeing initiatives and other priorities.
Much of the content of the Evolve Workplace Wellbeing toolkit has been influenced by the research detailed in this book. Find it here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-00665-4