Which Are The Wisest Workplace Wellbeing Interventions?

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Three Evidence-Based Approaches To Help People Care For Their Wellbeing

Helping people care for their wellbeing at work is challenging and complex. Our wellbeing habits, attitudes, and actions spread through a complicated web of social connections at the individual, team and organizational level. As a result, there isn’t one magic solution that works for everybody. So how can choose the interventions we invest in wisely?

“Wise interventions anticipate the questions that reasonably come up for all of us in our day-to-day lives. Then, they help people to find answers that are authentic, adaptive and help them make progress in the face of whatever challenges they are facing,” explained Professor Greg Walton from Stanford University when we interviewed him recently. “They aren’t necessarily ‘good’ or ‘effective’ or ‘the best’ interventions. They are simply psychologically wise because they anticipate all kinds of common questions people ask like: Can I do it? Or am I reaching the edge of my abilities? Am I excluded, disrespected, devalued? Am I a good person?”

Studies have found that wise interventions underscore three essential lessons that we often overlook when it comes to caring for wellbeing in workplaces, namely that:

For example, one of the main insights from Greg’s research is that our behavior stems from how we make sense of ourselves and social situations. This meaning-making is guided by three basic motivations:

But how might a wise intervention work practically in your workplace?

Studies suggest that wise interventions are most likely to create significant wellbeing benefits when they have been designed to:

For example, you could :

How might you design wise wellbeing interventions in your workplace?

For a free searchable database of more wise interventions, click here.

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