What is psychological wellbeing?
What is Psychological Wellbeing? At the most basic level, psychological wellbeing (PWB) is quite similar to other terms that refer to positive mental states, such as happiness or satisfaction, and in many ways it is not necessary, or helpful to worry about fine distinctions between such terms. If I say that I’m happy, or very satisfied with my life you can be pretty sure that my psychological wellbeing is quite high! What are the key components of psychological well being? Psychological…
What is pressure?
Sometimes people form the mistaken impression that improving and sustaining psychological wellbeing at work is about ensuring that people never feel under pressure. This is wrong! The misunderstanding is often based on confusion between pressure, strain and stress. For all of us, some degree of challenge is an important ingredient in a job – and clearly challenge brings with it a degree of pressure – and quite probably the job holder will experience some degree of strain. This is not…
What is employee engagement?
As David Macleod and Nita Clarke have shown in their government-sponsored reports, organisations with more engaged employees provide a better return for investors, have customers who use their products more, have customers who are more satisfied, lower staff turnover rates, lower absenteeism and perform better financially. But what is employee engagement? It’s a process that engages employees meaning they are happier with their organisations, less likely to want to leave and more likely…
What is morale?
What is morale? “the capacity of a group of people to pull together persistently and consistently in pursuit of a common purpose“ Alexander Leighton “A state of individual psychological wellbeing based upon a sense of confidence and usefulness and purpose” AudioEnglish.net Morale is a word that’s been around for some time, but what is morale? It reflects a very contemporary idea – it’s a quality that enables people to pull together, to stay well and positive, even when times are tough.…
How do I measure psychological wellbeing?
A prerequisite for changing anything, in a systematic way, is being able to measure it. If you can’t measure, it’s impossible to know whether things have changed or not. In fact, measuring psychological wellbeing is important, not just for understanding what might change after an intervention but, in the case of psychological wellbeing (PWB), accurate measurement is even more important in deciding what needs to happen to improve things. As already explained elsewhere on this website, PWB has…
What is presenteeism?
Presenteeism is both important and somewhat misunderstood. In practice, the term seems to be associated with at least three different meanings. One of these refers to people attending work even though they are sick, which is quite common. Many people will still attend work when they have a cold or perhaps an ongoing health condition such as a migraine or hay fever. Generally, when people are sick they perform less effectively. For example, the results below show the loss of productivity…
What is resilience?
There is a widely held belief that people are either resilient or not – and that’s it! This is a serious misunderstanding because in fact, in certain work situations some people would be very resilient, whereas in others they might feel under extreme pressure and cope very badly. In other words, how resilient someone is likely to be, depends on the situational challenges that they are confronted with. For example, consider a couple of different work situations. In the first, we have a role…