 How can you promote well-being in your workplace? This is a brief guide for middle and senior leaders who are keen to promote staff well-being and want some pointers on how to start. So the first thing is you need to understand the scope of the issue. So this is about thinking how can you perhaps survey or question your existing staff to find out where the current strengths and weaknesses lie. Now when we go out and we start holding focus groups or we put out a staff survey, we're going to get a range of things that come up. Some of those are going to be positive and you're going to find out that there are some great things going on that staff feel well supported and we might think about how we can replicate that throughout the organisation. On the other hand, you're often likely to uncover some more uncomfortable truths too and we need to be prepared to listen to those and to act on them as well. So it's really important that when we enter into this questioning exercise that we realise that we're going to get in a whole range of responses and to be prepared to manage those. It can be really helpful to do this sort of surveying and take a bit of a baseline of where you are and then you can make a bit of an action plan about areas that you think require some improvement and then you can always come back and resurvey staff periodically to see whether you seem to be making progress there or not. The other thing to bear in mind is that sometimes during this sort of exercise we will identify areas of weakness but when we take those areas of weakness and we make an active effort to kind of deal with them sometimes those are future areas of strength. So don't feel disheartened if this part of the exercise feels a little bit negative because actually you're planning for the future here and you're prepared to take action, which is great. Okay, number two, in terms of positive proactive things you can do to promote the well-being of your staff, thinking about their physical health is a really, really simple one. So I'm always encouraging people to think about the main kind of physical pillars of well-being when they're thinking about how to promote their resilience and their mental health. They're my first questions always, are you getting good and regular sleep? Do you have the opportunity to eat healthily and take a break to actually eat? And also do you get the opportunity to exercise and get outside if you can? And these are the things that often fall by the wayside when we're really, really busy with work. So it can be really helpful as an employer, as a manager to have a think about how we can encourage staff to do these things. So we might be thinking about how deadlines are set so that we can try and prevent those kind of very, very late work nights for example. We might be thinking about providing staff access to healthy snacks or making sure they get adequate opportunity to take a break at lunchtime for example. We might then be thinking about whether we can provide things like discounted membership to activities or perhaps if you're a school for example you might have access to various different physical activities that staff might be able to enjoy as well. So have a think about that kind of physical well-being of your staff and whether there are active things that you can do to encourage the promotion of that physical health. Number three is to have a think about the life work balance of your staff. Is that imbalance? Possibly not. It's really common for people to get this kind of wrong and to feel quite unhappy about that and it can have a really big impact on our well-being. We often feel like we're not achieving as we could or should at work but we also feel like we're not achieving as we could or should at home and that can be really uncomfortable all around and cause quite a lot of sort of stress and anxious feelings. And so helping staff to have a think about how we can get this balance as good as possible is really important. Sometimes that includes things like flexible working. It might be things like having a really clear communications protocol where you suggest that perhaps emails and calls should only be made between certain times of the day. The best way to have a look at this is to work with your staff, have a talk to them, find out what they think would be helpful because we all work differently and sometimes it's just about having the conversation, allowing staff to understand that we think it's really important that you have a life outside work as well and what can we as an employer as a line manager do to support that. Number four is to think about what communication is like in your workplace. So do you have an environment and a culture where people are able to be open and honest when they need support? So that might be support with their work, that might be support with a personal issue. Do you encourage help seeking? Do you encourage people to address issues early on? Do you encourage people to share their failures as well as their successes and to work through those with colleagues? Where we have an open, honest environment of communication, it often means that people are far more able to seek support earlier on and it can prevent problems from escalating. On the converse, when we find that we have an environment that is close to that kind of help seeking and support seeking, then people tend to sit with their issues, whether they're work issues or personal issues and sometimes those issues can end up really having a massive impact on them and not be dealt with in an appropriate or swift way, which can mean they escalate massively and end up kind of burning out or becoming overwhelmed, etc. So having an open and honest environment is really, really helpful. So have a think about what communication feels like in your workplace. Simple things like an environment where people ask how are you and they actually mean it and they expect an honest answer and they would give an honest answer if asked can make a huge difference to everyone's day to day working life. Number five is having a think about whether your workplace is one that celebrates successes. Now that doesn't have to be big successes. So we're often pretty good at celebrating births and marriages and books being published. You can tell I work in the education sector when I put book published with birth and marriage, but, you know, we are good at celebrating the big things. But actually, do you shout out about the little things? Do we celebrate our colleagues and each other when we make those small steps each day, which actually really make a big difference to the people that we're working with? So have a think about whether you could do that. I've spoken to a lot of colleagues recently who've started to have shout-out boards at their school. So having a notice board within the staff room where they can stick post-it notes, which just celebrates small achievements of colleagues or things that they found were kind or helpful and that sort of thing. So basically saying thank you to someone or well done to someone over the little things. So it doesn't always have to be big things. So are you in your workplace good at celebrating successes? And if not, could you? Could you kind of try and engender that positive culture, that culture of celebrating the things that go well? As well as obviously being supportive when things go less well. I hope this steps are helpful. I'd really love to hear how you get on with them and if you have any other suggestions, leave a comment and let me know. Thank you.