Paige Toms, Children’s Services Team Manager; Megan Pierce, Families Programs Manager; Colleen Crispe, Service Manager – Families & Children’s Specialist Services
Junction Support Services provides education, counselling and therapeutic support for children, adults and families who have experienced trauma, homelessness and family violence.
The organisation’s 200 staff and volunteers provide comprehensive and compassionate services to people in need – but when they measured workplace wellbeing, they discovered that caring for others came at a high price.
‘Like most people in our sector, our client and work demands are often very high,’ Paige explained. ‘This makes it difficult for us to prioritise our own wellbeing whilst we’re providing this support to other people.’
After using the PERMAH wellbeing survey, the Children’s Services team discovered that wellbeing meant different things for different people at different times. However, identifying the top barriers to wellbeing made things a lot clearer.
’The area calling out for our attention was physical health,’ said Paige. ‘We wanted to explore a way that we could support the team to implement health practices that would be easy for them to access during busy work schedules.’
The team chose 3 simple areas to focus on – regular movement, drinking more water and taking breaks – and incorporated this into a calendar.
The calendar is:
- on a template that can be changed as needed
- displayed in each office as a visual reminder and prompt to make wellbeing a priority
- set as reminders in electronic calendars, which is useful for staff in different office spaces.
Taking small wellbeing breaks sounded easy, but the team was surprised at how challenging it was to stop and do those things.
‘Often you’d start something, look up and it's 3pm and you've been stuck on a phone or at your desk all day,’ said Paige.
The calendar prompts teams to care for their wellbeing every day, rather than being rigid about specific activities at specific times.
The prompts are also useful for sparking conversations among team members that raise everyone's awareness about wellbeing. As a result, the team learned that caring for their wellbeing is easier when they support and encourage each other to prioritise these behaviours.
‘Wellbeing is now a standing agenda item on our monthly team meetings, and we discuss things that are working for us and things we might want to add,’ said Paige.
To find out more about setting up and using the ‘Workplace wellbeing calendar’, please watch this short video:
Updated