5 top tips on workplace health and wellbeing strategy from Professor Sir Cary Cooper

Off the back of our blog series on workplace health and wellbeing by our Managing Director, Ben Moss, we asked our Founding Director and CIPD President, Professor Sir Cary Cooper for his 5 top tips for businesses thinking about creating their workplace wellbeing strategy. This is what he told us…

Tip 1: Be clear on the purpose

Know why your business values wellbeing and what you hope to achieve by investing in it – both for your employees and for the organisation as a whole.

Tip 2: Remember wellbeing is cultural

You won’t harness what wellbeing can offer if you don’t embed it in your broader culture. That means you have to think beyond commissioning line manager and mental health first aid training. As my colleague Ben Moss wrote in Part 3 of his blog post on the subject… it all has to add up to something: a vision, with real outcomes.

Tip 3: Be realistic

In my experience, most organisations now ‘get’ the business case for wellbeing and that can lead them towards over-ambitious aims in terms of what it can achieve for them. Better to plan carefully and exceed expectations – a strategy is about creating the future, it’s necessarily long-term.

Tip 4: If you need a strategy write a strategy, not a plan

There’s a fundamental difference between a strategy and a plan. Understand what that is and take action in line with what your business and its employees most need.

Tip 5: Take good advice

Whole business wellbeing is a relatively new discipline, so it’s unlikely you’ve done this before. But there are people out there who have, stepping back and talking to the right people at the outset will save you a lot of time, money and effort in the long-run.