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Last Word | Catalyst
Wellbeing at Work
How to Design, Implement and
Evaluate an Effective Strategy
Cary Cooper and Ian Hesketh, Kogan Page, 2019.
A
t a CIPD event in late 2018,
psychologist Professor Sir
Cary Cooper went on the
offensive against what he termed the
“quick fixes” many organisations
adopt to improve employees’ mental
ill-health.
He urged employers to focus on
the underlying causes. Rather than
offering only “easy” solutions such as
“mindfulness at lunch”, organisations
need to integrate wellness within
their organisations and train their
managers in the people skills to
create supportive work cultures.
Now, together with fellow
academic, Ian Hesketh, Cooper has
published a hands-on, practical
manual to help HR professionals
play their part by creating the right
infrastructures and strategies for
workplace wellbeing.
Wellbeing at Work is a step-by-step
guide to designing and implementing
a wellbeing strategy, from getting
buy-in from the right people through
to measurement and evaluation,
with cases studies, tips and exercises
along the way. We all know that stress
at work not only blights the lives of
individuals affected, but also has a
detrimental effect on productivity
and performance.
HR teams are well-placed to make a
difference and this book provides the
tools (and reassurance) they need to
create workable strategies to reduce
anxiety and improve engagement to
the benefit of everyone.
Brave New Work:
Are You Ready to Reinvent
Your Organization?
Aaron Dignam, Penguin Portfolio, 2019
A
aron Dignam’s book opens
with a couple of fascinating
challenges. He shows us an
organisation chart and asks us to
identify when it was created. Then, he
contrasts two types of traffic control:
the traffic light and the roundabout.
It’s an absorbing way to introduce
two of the major themes of his new
book: the fact that it’s even possible
for us to recognise an organisation
chart from 1910, and the inertia
inherent in what he calls an operating
system (in this case the traffic light)
despite evidence that roundabouts,
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which require drivers to think and
use their own judgement to follow
simple rules, are safer, cheaper and
still work during power outages.
Welcome to Brave New Work,
a manifesto for evolutionary
organisations, the roundabouts
bucking the trend in a world full of
traffic lights. These are organisations
that exhibit different mindsets and
use purpose and transparency to
create cultures where individual
responsibility is encouraged.
The direction is clear but
serendipity is also allowed; where
structures are decentralised but
coherence is retained. Working
through 12 ‘domains’, covering
everything from strategy to workflow
to compensation, Dignam advocates
a new way of working, better suited
to the world today, complete with
guidelines and activities for change.
Buckle up; it’s a wild ride, but a
thought-provoking one.