What do you think of when you hear the word “wellbeing” in relation to employees at work? What images does the word bring to mind? How do you think the concept of “wellbeing” impacts those around you?

For me, wellbeing encompasses my entire life – my physical energy, mental focus, attitude to the people I see everyday, thoughts about myself, feelings in my relationships, clarity, creativity… everything. Felce and Perry (1995) define wellbeing as “… comprises objective descriptors and subjective evaluations of physical, material, social and emotional wellbeing, together with the extent of personal development and purposeful activity, all weighted by a personal set of values.”

This idea of wellbeing makes our traditional understanding of health seem incomplete and inadequate to describe the intricacies of our lives. We can be “healthy” – meet all the required norms of heart health, lung function, digestion, liver and kidney function and so on but still not have adequate”wellbeing” in our lives. Being physically healthy but having problems at home or other wellbeing issues can affect the quality of our lives and impact on our work performance everyday. If we only ever address physical indicators of health we have an incomplete picture of employees lives, we have an incomplete picture of how their health and wellbeing play into the workplace environment. This idea of wellbeing can also make it difficult to measure – blood serum levels of cholesterol or PSA are numbers on a chart and are the same for everyone, wellbeing however is inseparable from the individual’s values and how do we measure those?

One answer is to provide individual, personalised support for every staff member you have. This ensures that their unique view of the world and their experiences are taken into account when any treatment program is recommended. Only having access to gyms or other group solutions however doesn’t recognise the individual’s needs and those staff members that don’t fit in or don’t comply or aren’t really interested in pumping weights get left out of any corporate health initiative. Bringing in to your workplace some kind of confidential, personalised support is the best way to look after your employee’s wellbeing and health and will give massive returns to you, the employer again and again.