# Workplace Surgery: wellbeing on a budget

- **Episode:** [154](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/154.md) (2024-12-17)
- **Type:** workplace-surgery
- **Tags:** wellbeing, budget, employee-support
- **Time:** 45:18–51:56 (start 2718s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/154?t=2718](https://truthliesandwork.com/154?t=2718)

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[45:18] Leanne Elliott: Oh dear
[45:18] Al Elliott: I know I might have started this a little bit too effusively. Um, and also noticed, I've also noticed more people working through lunches or logging on during evenings. I want to make wellbeing a priority, but unlike the big agencies, I don't have the budget for gym memberships, meditation apps, or an in-house therapist. I've tried researching wellbeing strategies online, but it's overwhelming. Some articles suggest you need a full program with mental health first aiders, wellness workshops, and dedicated resources. Others suggest things like team yoga or fruit bowls
[45:47] Leanne Elliott: Mm-hmm
[45:48] Al Elliott: Uh, this feels really cheesy, And like, as I'm just ticking some kind of wellbeing box. Realistically, I can only— this is good— realistically, I can only allocate about $2,000. What's that, about £1,800, £1,500 annually to this? Not the tens of thousands I see people spending, um, in other companies. So where can I start when I've only got limited resources?
[46:09] Leanne Elliott: Okay, um, I'm not surprised you're overwhelmed. There's a lot of noise out there when it comes to wellbeing, and there's a lot of nonsense Actually, truth be told. Um, there's 2, 2, 3 things bring to mind. First of all, you have one member of staff who is hitting a critical point of, of stress and is experiencing panic attacks. And as somebody who has experienced a panic attack, they are hugely debilitating. It's, it's awful. If you haven't experienced it, you can't even describe it. It's just the worst thing. So first of all, you have a person in crisis, and this person needs an individual intervention very, very quickly. It's very difficult when you don't have the resources, but there are resources out there that can help, um, and also that this person can do as part of their own, um, resources. And I know it's hard to get a GP appointment right now. I know it's hard. Um, but really, probably one of the best things this person can do is contact their GP and start to, to talk to them about the anxiety they're experiencing. And fingers crossed, they've got a good GP that's gonna respond to that. The second thing I'd say is if you don't have anything in place right now, there is a brilliant organization called Perks, and we mention them on the show quite frequently, and we're not sponsored by them. You know that we're sponsored by HubSpot, but they're just really, really good and they're really, really affordable. I think it's something like £3 per employee per month. Something like that. And you can get access to basically a whole suite of, of support services, including Um, is it called telehealth, where you have a GP appointment? I've used it before and had a GP appointment the next afternoon, which is unheard of. Um, and they can, they can help in exactly that way. There is access to, um, counseling services, uh, one-to-one counseling. There's all sorts of benefits or perks. You can see why it's called that. Um, perks that an employee can access. And if you really can't afford that, it's probably something that's, well, that the individual can do themselves. You can do it as an individual, and £3 per month to access these types of services is ridiculous. You will not find it cheaper anywhere else. So, that is another really good resource to check out for this individual. In terms of the wider wellbeing strategy, first of all, Perks is a good place to start for the overall team, and by the sounds of it, well within your budget, particularly if you did a split in terms of the cost. You could pay 50%, the employee pays 50%. The other thing is to start thinking about actually the work environment that you're creating. You said that you're seeing people working late, you know, not logging off, answering emails late into the night. The funny thing about wellbeing is that we often focus on the individual interventions that we can do, the ones I've just mentioned, whereas actually at an organisational level, there's lots that we can do. And I promise all of them you'll already be doing. It's just how well you're currently doing them. So, things like relationships, as you know, the previous question, are people working well together? Do we have any bottlenecks in processes that's causing frustration and unnecessary work? Workload? Do we have an issue with role clarity? Um, are people doing responsibilities and tasks that aren't within their remit, but there's— they've had that scope, um, that role creep come into what they're doing? There's going to be other things as well around the quality of your managers in terms of supporting people. Really, there's a lot of operational things you can do to lighten the load on your people. I would recommend looking at things like that, and really the best place to start is talking to your people, and that's free. You can just talk to them and ask some questions. Ask them how they're getting on, what's frustrating them, what's making their job harder, and how can you make their job easier. That's going to give you some clues as to what is stressing and straining the team right now, which is contributing to potentially lower levels of well-being overall. Once you have an idea of that, you'll probably then realise some things operationally you can do, which you'll, you'll be the expert in. It's your business, you know how it all works. But there'll be things operational that you can do to make this better pretty much overnight. What I'd say then is taking that, that same strategy to the next level is start to gather some insights, some analytics. And this is where something like the RX7 is really useful. Being honest, I think we're slightly out of your price range. Um, but what you can do for completely for free is the HSE Management Standards Survey. Talk about this quite a bit as well. I will leave a link in the show notes. Yeah. It's a really great survey. It's 30 questions. It's completely free. They give you the tools as well to analyze results, and it will show you areas or like hotspots in your organization where what we call psychosocial factors are influencing high levels of stress. And that is going to be relationships, it's going to be control over people's roles, it's going to be the amount of change and uncertainty in your business. And again, the HSE offers recommendations of how you can manage these things. And as I said, most of it in the first instance is operational. You're looking at organizational things that you can do, not individual interventions. And by the sounds of it, your research is pointing you towards individual interventions, and they are not as effective. I promise you, they are not as effective as actually figuring out organizationally how you can create an environment that supports your people. So that would be my advice. Focus on your person in crisis. Start to ask questions to the team about operationally what's making their workloads higher or their work harder than they should be. And then when you're ready, start to look at gathering some analytics. And the HSE Management Standards is a really great and free place to start
[51:36] Al Elliott: Fabulous answer. I've just reread this and noticed that this person does use dollars. Doesn't say whether it's US or Australian. I think Perks is either in the US or it's about to be in the US
[51:46] Leanne Elliott: Just launched
[51:47] Al Elliott: Just launched. Um, the HSE free survey you were talking about there, that is UK-based, but it'll work for American companies
[51:54] Leanne Elliott: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, it's all online