GILL MATHIAS was approached by Bedfordshire Borough Council’s Health Improvement team, through a previous recommendation, to activate some training and coaching to address the ability for their employees to learn to understand the importance of resilience and how this was positive; to learn that this was having the ability to bounce back and then forward after challenging experiences.
Concerns had been raised from the Health Wellbeing Team who had conducted some meetings with the HR department after many changes with Bedfordshire Borough Council.
The Council had experienced much change within their organisation and this had caused some disruption and a degree of anxiety to the employees.
The brief that was discussed was to create “a happy place to work” and initially the key aim was to equip managers with tools to recognise potential signs of stress, lack of focus, lack of confidence or self-belief and prevent it. The instruction from the Health Improvement Team to Gill amongst other ideas, was to explain to the Managers why Bedfordshire Council were placing such great emphasis on employee wellbeing.
However, during the first training session it quickly emerged that one of the key issues had been “presenteeism/absenteeism” as some of the staff within the teams were bringing all their issues to work and being non-productive and disrupting other colleagues.
After the second training session, it was decided to hold a training day for the staff who were off work due to “stress” and it was felt that a programme that inspired this section to focus on their wellbeing would lead to a positive return to health, and this proved to be the case.
At first, some people were sceptical about tackling the work-related issues, but once the guidelines and training had been received, the Managers then understood many of the issues surrounding the resilience brief, by linking it with a chart and every day activities, warning signs and to develop easy strategies to conquer the signs such as breathing exercises and strategies to help with their teams with their mental, physical, emotional, social and spiritual well-being.
It was discovered that the Managers had no regular meetings within their teams and it was arranged that after training that there would always be weekly meetings to establish any problems and resolve the issues quickly.
Gill explained that communication was vital and that everyone within the team had a voice which would be respected.
Gill worked very successfully with the Health team and as a result there were further training sessions necessary every few month which completed after a period of 18 months.
A number of individuals received coaching to move them forward to returning to work full time.
The assessment of the Health Improvement Team was that the collaboration with Gill had been highly successful and a very beneficial process with excellent results.
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