Transcript – WorkTogether – Wellbeing in the workplace Benjamin Ellis So today's topic, it has become one of those hot topics I think in the last couple of years. But the reality is it has a longer history. And so today we're talking about wellbeing and I am delighted today to have Zelda join at me who we have worked with here at SocialOptic for a long while and brings a wealth of expertise. So Zelda I’ll let you introduce yourself to the listeners. Zelda Franklin-Hills All right, so I'm Zelda and I work at Fife college and I'm the director of OD and HR there. So I'm responsible for the people strategy and the writing of it and the implementation of it so wellbeing firmly kind of falls into my remit and I'm kind of excited to share my experiences and thoughts around wellbeing in the workplace and certainly in a college sector, and maybe wider than that. Benjamin Ellis Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think I think that what you have done, I think just for the context of listeners has been, yeah, externally recognized in, in terms of those things there. So it really is a privilege to have you here. And probably the place to start is actually, what do we mean by wellbeing? Because it seems to kind of end up in every single LinkedIn post and dropped into every single strategy at the moment. But yeah, I'd like to step back and go, how do we define wellbeing? What do we mean by that in an employee context? Zelda Franklin-Hills So I think that it's a really interesting question. What is wellbeing? And because it's hard to divorce wellbeing in workplace and wellbeing for the person, I think. And so at Fife, we've kind of started to look at it in terms of kind of four pillars. So those four pillars are around emotional, social, physical and financial. So to kind of cover that whole remit of wellbeing, sometimes people will think, well, why would you include financial? But I think this latest economic crisis has kind of told people why financial is important and why it can affect your wellbeing because if you don't have enough money compared to what your outgoings are, that's that. That can be really worrying for people and when I think about those 4 pillars and I, I think about, you know, emotional is not just about how you're feeling, but it's also about your resilience and your self-awareness and how you manage positive and negative and emotions and feelings. And I think about social, and I think social is also really, really important as we come out of COVID and all the things that have happened there. So it's about interactions with others. It's about connectedness. I think it's about conflict resolution. How you do that. I also think it’s about how you how you adapt to change. So it's quite broad for me. And physical is all I think, which is one of our third pillar is about managing health. It's about prevention, but it's also about improvement. And financial. We talked a little bit about that, but it's about, you know, do people manage their finances well, how do they support budgeting? The things that we can do that can help in the workplace, so it's not just necessarily about your salary, but it could be things around, can we give that extra benefit and can you, you know, join groups where they offer benefits and money off for certain things? And can you do salary sacrifice? So there's kind of a whole range of things that can come in under Financial. For me, those four pillars make up the wellbeing of a person, but also the wellbeing of someone in the workplace. Benjamin Ellis I really I like the model cause a lot of the approaches, well approaches to wellbeing from individual point of view are obviously kind of very individualistic, although actually even that is shifting and I still have a slight hand in the self-improvement space and it's been interesting to see the narrative shift there to even in that domain start to think about it in more of a social context. But yeah, I think that model in the workplace of taking into account not just the individual factors, but that the social and the environmental pressures around it as well is a really nice robust model. I like it like simple and clear, but it covers all of the different attributes because I think trying to pick off wellbeing as an individual responsibility and exercise, which has been a little bit of a strain in some workplaces, I think doesn't get to the heart of the matter really and say particularly we've got a lot of customers in healthcare and there we’re really seeing, you know, cost of living, the economic factors are very significant to people's wellbeing because it you know it is a constraint on what they can do and how they can live. So I like it. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah. Benjamin Ellis So how does an organization get started with wellbeing then? If we kind of recognize that leadership level, this is something we want to do. Where do you start as an organization with wellbeing? Zelda Franklin-Hills For us, we were very much thinking about it in terms of the impact of COVID and how that’d left people feeling, but also because it's important for us to put people at the centre and that we knew that we would be moving into different ways of working. So I think you've got to kind of think about, well, what are your motivations for wellbeing and why do you want to do it and where are your levers? So what is it that you want to change? So if I think about Fife college we had COVID and that kind of started that conversation, but also we know that we are an aging population and as we age, wellbeing can change for individuals and people and that can be through people, you have to care for and so you might change from caring for your children to caring for grandparents. You might change to caring for your parents, and in those situations, or even a loved one. And so all of that can impact on that and as I'm talking about that, I'm thinking that was another impact around COVID and how that changed for some people. And you know, their family structures may have changed through that for different reasons and we didn't really have an issue around things like turnover or absence and or uh or any of those types of things. So those weren't necessarily the drivers for us, but we do have a range of different employees that we needed to think about. So we've got a range of different roles and people in the organization and I think that also impacts how you want to think about wellbeing. So we’ve people in offices, we have people in classrooms, we have people in prisons because we deliver a learning services contract in the Scottish Prison service. So we have a range of people have people are peripatetic and they go out so they spend more time out than in. And we also we're starting and have been on that journey of smarter working and agile working. So where do we want to work? And all of those things led us to think about wellbeing. And I think those are all the types of things an organization would need to think about when they think about their wellbeing journey and what do they want to change? Or what are the issues that they've identified around while being that they need to think about? Benjamin Ellis That's helpful, you starting with the people and both in the broader social context and in terms of the makeup of your organization, it's interesting how organizations have worked with over the years do come to those points where either they brought in a new intake of graduates and that's shaped the organization and the issues or you know, the kind of parenting related things have become an issue or they've got an aging population with lots of people coming up to retirement and they're looking to, you know, extend the accessibility of the workplace for those people to retain that talent. Yeah, that's it. Is interesting that you have to start with well, what? What are you working with? Because the needs are gonna be quite different. And yeah, I think when I when I first came across wellbeing which was a long, long time ago, back in my days of working IT, it was it was, uh, we've given you a gym membership. There you go. Which even for me as a non-sporty IT person, probably didn't best address my health and wellbeing needs at the time. It's interesting that you that starting with why? I mean, tell me a little bit more about that, not necessarily the Fife specifics, but that’s quite a different approach because that's quite a strategic approach to wellbeing, whereas a lot of what I see is can be quite tactical or programmatic and talking with you, one of the things that that came out was quite a different perspective really on addressing wellbeing. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah, I mean I think as an organization, the question why in wellbeing is really, really important. I would always ask what is the purpose of doing something around wellbeing for us as the organization? That's the question I would ask. And what is it that we want to change and why do we want to change that? So we were quite clear, as you say, you know, as you said, we were quite strategic in our thinking and why we wanted to do that. And then there's been other layers. As we started to think about it that we've kind of brought in. So we knew, for example, that we that we would have more flexible working. So now we started to think about that in terms of smarter working. And moving away from the binary choice that we were having of you're either at home or you're at work. So now with us, we're developing again thinking about so and how does that then support wellbeing? So that for me is the key thing in an organization. What is it that we want to address? Why do we want to address it and what do we want out of that? How is it going to help us to do the things as an organization that we need to do? And I think you're right. Sometimes there is this temptation to say. Right. OK. Well, we need to do something on wellbeing. So what we'll do is we'll run some events and we'll label those events as wellbeing and then that's doing wellbeing it is that it absolutely is. But that's not in a thought necessarily. In a thought out wider strategy over a period of time and So what you might get like you say Benjamin is I get some gym membership or which might be suitable for me. I mean, it might not be for you, but it might be, or you might do something else and you know, so you might run some occupational health. Kind of advice and sessions that people can go, but if that's not in a strategy. And that's not focused on something you might end up with a bit more of a scattergun approach and spend quite a lot of money and not actually ever. Change the wellbeing of your people in the way that you want to do and or support them in their wellbeing perhaps. Rather than change it will, though sometimes you will change it for people so that would be what I would think about. And I think that bigger strategy piece is really important because what that then does is it really helps you get the investment that you need. And the right amount of investment. And but it also helps you then to describe. How you're going to measure some of that, measurement’s important. Benjamin Ellis I love that you use the term investment there because sticking my board hat on for a minute, having sat on boards. You know, oftentimes people bring initiatives. It's like this is what we want to spend on this, which is always one of those moments where you tear your hair out slightly. Sometimes, maybe as a board member, but. Actually, somebody could say well, this is what we want to invest in and This is why and this is the impact we expect from it and effectively embedded in that. Here's how we will measure success. Like, that's what you want to see as a board member is kind of OK. This makes sense. We're, you know, we're taking this money. We're not just throwing some fun events, this is actually an investment that's gonna achieve these outcomes that is going to improve the organization. I think sometimes people can be a little bit shy on that with wellbeing because that. You know it is. It's a good thing to do, and there's a social good to it, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have to make commercial sense. Then it doesn't have to have measurable objectives. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah. And I think one of the one of my reflections in terms of our sort of HR strategies is we did put in some outcomes and we did think about that but I think the better way of looking at it and we didn't do enough of it we absolutely didn't, and I know you know, as you said, we have won awards and things, but I would recognise there's always weaknesses in what you could do. And there's always things that you can improve upon so that would be one of the areas and I think for me we always struggle in HR and to think about what, well, how are we going to measure this? What are what are our results? What are our outcomes? Sometimes, the even harder thing is what is the impact to actually in terms of impact, how would you, how do you measure that in the organization? So you could measure things like your sickness absence, your turnover, and those types of things. But actually, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're wellbeing programme is working. You need to think about our how do our staff feel more well against your 4 pillars or whatever it is that you've decided on. And so I'll give you a lovely story about impact and outcome. So this is not about wellbeing, but when I worked in another organization, we were looking at women in the workplace and women getting promotion. And also, why they weren't. So we decided that we would invest and have a program to support women to get promotion. And actually what happened is most of the women who participated in the program didn't get promoted. They left. So if we were to look at, kind of it was that successful or not, you could say well, no, it wasn't because everybody left, but the reality was those that left went on to much bigger roles in other organizations than they probably would have got in our organization. So you know it is about how you think about it and the impact. So you could say the impact was pretty poor for the you know for that organization, but actually it wasn't, it was really great for those individuals. Benjamin Ellis Yeah. Zelda Franklin-Hills And so it's how you think about all of these things. We haven't. And as I'm saying, I haven't got that right in the organization. We're still thinking about that. That will be one of our developments as we start to think about right, OK, we've been doing wellbeing we've got the strategy, that strategy is here for a time, what else? Benjamin Ellis Yeah. And it it's interesting that balance of measures, because people often jump to the analytics, which is a good starting place, you know turn over and those sorts of things they are very laggy measures in terms of they fall behind and they're very vulnerable to confounding factors to external ones. So it's interesting that as we're building a body of data. Actually, the attitudinal measures, how do you feel? How do other people around do you feel, actually, that they're leading indicators cause you see those moving more quickly, but the other piece of that is that those attitudes do directly move into performance and that's something we're seeing more and more because of the linkages between how people are feeling the time off that they may take related to that or even if they don't actually just the drag that gets introduced to teams sometimes if a team member is not at their best actually the radius of the impact and that is quite significant in the organization a lot more than people realize. It's not just like 1 ripple out is a couple of ripples out and something's changed, but you don't know why and it is because there's somebody struggling with one of those dimensions of wellbeing, so actually addressing it, you see the changes in the attitudinal measures, but we see the other things follow in terms of the relationship with manager. Understanding what the organization is about, all these other measures moved because actually, if somebody is struggling then they’re unlikely to be engaged, they're unlikely to be managing their team well if they're managing a team, so yeah, it's a very direct impact on the attitudinal measures to what actually happens in the organization and wellbeing is, you know, I think one of the things I've seen move the dial most rapidly on those things. I think partly because it shifts the relationship or the perception of the relationship between the employee and the organization because it is a way of saying we care and demonstrating that we care, which is, you know, one of those things that changes employee engagement. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah. And actually, when you were talking there, as organizations get leaner, which some are as a result of what you know, the situations and economies and downturns and things. You might find that you're more reliant on single people in one post because you've only got a person, you can't afford to have more than that in an organization, and therefore they're wellbeing becomes really paramount, and particularly like you say, if something's not right, then if they're the sole person in that job who does that in that organization or in that part of the business or in that location that could become really quite important. So yes, you're right. That kind of engagement and that attitude and how you help people to feel more engaged and positive towards their employer can reap benefits in those kinds of kinds of environment. Benjamin Ellis You've moved the ball into one of our hot topic here at SocialOptic which is something that has been, I wouldn't say heated debate but and yeah potentially a, controversial view. So I come from a systems engineering background and in systems engineering resilience is about system design, not component design, and so I take that into the organizational world in terms of lot of people talk about resilience as being an expectation of an employee, whereas for me, resilience is how you design the roles and organizations around them. And there is this pull between resilient systems and efficiency and that that is that's the trade off. If you want a resilient system, actually there has to be effectively excess capacity to deal with system failure that from an engineering point of view, that's what you have to do. There's been a little bit of a kind of push into resilience being an individual responsibility rather than an organizational one, and it's interesting. I think I've seen a few things I think like Bruce Daisly is talking about this a little bit now and like the pendulums moving the other way and now. But for a period of time, there's, like, we're gonna train you in resilience and it's your responsibility to get through this stuff. And I know that's very different to your view, but yes, I couldn’t resist kind of saying that one in there that there is that thing about very lean organizations you you've got to be aware that there is a balance there between resilience and running an organisation incredibly lean and that they're not compatible. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah. And we have to be quite careful with resilience because I can, you know, I might be able to cope with quite a lot of things and therefore be seen to be quite resilient, but that might not be the case. I might be just coping but appear quite resilient or other people you might you know, you can be very judgmental about resilience too, you know. So something happens, Ben and you know and you go, I can’t kind of cope anymore? And I’m like well I didn’t know you couldn’t cope with that. When you think about resilience and you can bring your own judgment into those things, but really the reality is when we're in the workplace, you only know the person that you see in the workplace. You don't know what else is going on. If they don't share, and all of those things affect how resilient a person can be. Benjamin Ellis And I like going back to your 4 pillars model. You know where things become a significant issue. It's very rarely 1 axis of pressure. I mean it can be, but usually what's happened is things are coming at that person from multiple angles. And one thing is just the last thing and so, one is being aware of that. Yeah, you're gonna get different responses from people potentially in the same the same role that are not necessarily individual differences. They're situational differences. If somebody's dealing with family bereavement, you know or quite dramatic shifts in the childcare provision. All. Yeah. Any form of external stressor or you know the money is not meeting the bills. You've got base level of stress in there. So actually small things that happen in workplace, it can be catastrophic if you've got somebody else who's like, you know, all good in the world, they've got money saved up in the bank and, you know, everything is just rainbows from the other dimensions. They can cope with a lot happening in a situation that somebody else might not, and one of the things about wellbeing that I think it's not immediately obvious is that preventative thing. If you're helping to move all of those dimensions, so in your context and four pillars, actually you know that is a way to tackle resilience where you're not making the individuals responsibility you're giving them. Capacity to deal with what comes up. Zelda Franklin-Hills Umm yeah. But I mean, even and that can be really difficult because some of the things around you know if you think about the four pillars, financial and it's one of those that people don't talk about. Benjamin Ellis Yeah. Zelda Franklin-Hills I mean, we don't talk about money very much anyway, but you know, to ask people in the workplace to start to talk about, well, you know, actually I'm in hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of debt. I'm not great at budgeting and I don't really, you know, I'm living beyond my means. That is not a conversation that is gonna happen that often in the workplace. Benjamin Ellis Yeah. Zelda Franklin-Hills I'm and certainly not with managers, so one of the things you know and that's one of the areas where we we've thought quite a lot and had to think quite hard about what we do. And so we do, you know, we do have links with a, a kind of local community bank and that's great because that supports that bank. So people can save for Christmas people can do those types of things, but also they can get loans and if they use that community bank then that's helping other people in the community to use that. So we're kind of, you know, through some of these things you can support other initiatives that support other people who are not connected to the college. So that's really good. And but there are, you know when we think about financial we ran a session in one of our festivals to look at finances and how people do that and our first kind of experiences that it was not many people went but what we then said is why OK well why aren't people going well probably because they don't want to talk about it. So then we said, right, OK, what people can do is anonymously put in questions that they have around finances. And then one of the team, one of our team can put that to the expert and then they get answers and people can then listen. We recorded that and then people can listen and they go, oh, that was my question and actually that was, you know, that was an answer and that that then might lead them to feel more comfortable to talk about. Right. OK, well, that was really interesting. I now need to go and get some advice of more advice about that, so I'm yeah, we've tried quite a lot of different sessions around the four pillars and some are really good and some get lots of attendance and some aren't because they are more taboo subjects and so you know we've run sessions around cancer and they've been really well received and well attended. But some of our other sessions on more sensitive subjects haven't been. So we have to think quite hard about how we deliver some of that. So going back to that question of resilience, it is about how do you get people to engage in some of the areas where it might be affecting their resilience in the workplace or even at home in areas that they wouldn't want to talk about whether colleagues. Benjamin Ellis Yeah, it, it, I hope will come back round that that aspect as well because that uh maybe we explore that now, and there is that thing that a lot of the topics around wellbeing are very personal and there is that question both from an organizational point of view and an employee point of view. Where do these boundaries exist? And you know, one of the things that has been highlighted with the changes from working from home is it is kind of shaking those boundaries up a little bit. But it is that question. Well, what? What is personal stuff? What are people comfortable talking about in the workplace? What do they not and where particularly as an employer or as a leadership team, where does your responsibility extend to? Because there are going to be things that are very personal to that employee that are not going to be things within the organizations control necessarily. Cancer being, you know, very good example of that. Zelda Franklin-Hills I know that whole boundary thing is a really difficult one, and if I think about a person though, a human being, wellbeing doesn't, there's no boundary in wellbeing when you think about that and so when I think about what we need to do as an organization and as a college, it is for me, how do we support people, perhaps to have some of those things, those conversations with people that they feel uncomfortable with and you need to maybe offer a range of different things. So we've talked about festivals and those things that we do and but also how do you enable people to access information which might be about stuff they don't want to talk about in the workplace and that will be probably individual for those people. I mean, we can universally say people don't like to talk about their finances at all in work, or at all. And but that the level at which they talk about that might change. So for some people it might, they might want to talk about it work. It really is having a huge impact on them. So to boundaries I think are quite difficult. I would definitely go with the human. There isn't really a boundary in a human, and so it is. How much do we offer as an organization to support people and what does that look like? So information, sessions, employee assistance programs, maybe champions of things. So you could create kind of networks and champions of people, so it's so an individual doesn't have to talk to a manager. They could talk to somebody who's trained to do that, or somebody in the organization who's willing to listen to someone and help. And you could, there are multiple ways of doing it and I think you have to provide multiple access points, but the more that you talk about these things in your organization, the more that perhaps people will want to talk about them too. And so therefore those boundaries get even more blurred, and that can only be helpful, you know, if somebody thinks that maybe they have something that perhaps isn’t right with them perhaps they’re not feeling very well, but they're worried about maybe going to a doctor or they're worried about going to talk about that. Wouldn't it be great in an organization if they could find someone and say look. I am worried and I don't know if I want to go to the doctor because I'm worried about that and they could get some support to do that, which would help them to get an early diagnosis, get an early diagnosis, probably will support them much better than waiting for a long time when the prognosis may not be so good, no matter what that is. Benjamin Ellis Interesting there are, you know, obviously there are individual differences around that and that's always been the case in terms of, you know, cultures that people have been brought up in and those sorts of factors. But they're actually there is a company, organizational culture aspect to that. And I'm thinking about some organizations we worked with. They're very competitive cultures and so people talk about something that might be perceived as a weakness as like within that organizational culture as a no no. Nobody’s gonna do that. And so for them it's been quite a shift to get to the point where I feel like I can safely talk about these things. So there is that bit of shaping organizational culture to create the context for those conversations. So it's interesting to hear as well that that could be done quite programmatically. I like that idea of giving people other people to speak to other than their line manager that they might not be comfortable speaking to, just to enable those conversations to happen and get people access to the resources that they need. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah, and culture is important to create that kind of world, to create a really good wellbeing environment. You know where it's talked about, where it is part of what everybody does. And is part of what a manager and an individual might talk about. And I think for the college, the other reason why wellbeing is important is that kind of crossover when you talk about boundaries with our students. So unusually, our clients are in the campuses all the time with us. So that's quite unusual. You know, in a bank they might come in and then they'll, you know, customer will come in and walk out, whereas we, our learners are with us. Maybe every day, every week of their course. So that's kind of different for us in terms of our boundaries and how we think about wellbeing, because if you're clients are always there then they're always there with your staff who are experiencing potentially and your colleagues issues. So how do we deal with that? So alongside our wellbeing for staff, we obviously have students at the centre and we have quite a lot of wellbeing services. But the other reason why I feel that's quite important is because our learners will be employees of the future and employers of the future. So if we can show them what a great wellbeing culture is, or a great culture that can only serve the whole of our community better and the whole of our workplaces of the future better and so boundaries are really interesting. And I'm sure there's a whole topic in that. Benjamin Ellis A great illustration of just great social value, and I think just putting that context for people you, we work with lots of organizations in the healthcare domain and there you have sometimes an even more again it depends on the nature of the healthcare the service being provided. But quite often they're patients will be there and actually for the employees as they come in every day. Actually, that patient is a big part of their working context and that patient is by definition unwell, that's why they're in the service. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah. Benjamin Ellis So yeah, that that's the kind of 1 extreme through to, you know, where you got a student population on campus and that level of contact. But actually there's a continuum that every organization exists on because one of the things I often look at is how much customer or service contact is there for the organization and different parts of the organization, because that shapes where you're going to get flex and culture. But for every organization there is some form of contact and it might not be the customers or the users. So I think about and yeah, for software as a service business, for example. Actually, there's not a lot of contact with the users are not a big impact on the on the employers. They might, some of the support folks might have chatted with them, but the developers would never have it. However, in those organizations, the balance shifts to the impact of the supplies that they work with, and actually the wellbeing of the supplier. So there is there is some domain of influence on those external factors and sometimes it it's either the organization's responsibility or a good idea to reach over those barriers that a little bit and share the resources, even if it's at the level of. Here's something we've done as an organization might work for you. Might not, but yeah here's how we approached it. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah, and social value is important. So one of the things we did in our sort of first year of real umm wellbeing festivals, we ran a wellbeing conference and anybody could come along to that. And you didn't have to have an association with the college. You could come because you had seen it on LinkedIn, or you've seen it somewhere and you just needed to register and that was really good for the college. So we had a lot of people who came because it was the first time they've been to the college or the first time they thought about the college, a lot of different organizations came. So sometimes those types of activities are really good for your PR too. So they're not just good for the wellbeing of staff, but they're good for social value. They're good for your reputation and they're good for all those other things. So it's about how do we think about those things in that broader strategic context, not just I'm doing some wellbeing so that's great. Benjamin Ellis Well, I think that's maybe to come round to end on which is how do you take a long term view on wellbeing because you know it's always initially going to end up being quite programmatic because you gotta start somewhere. But from where you are now, what would your, I guess your advice be or your thoughts on how do you take a long term approach to it? Cause it's not a job that's ever done, is it really, wellbeing? Zelda Franklin-Hills No, absolutely it's not. And even if you've done it for a person, something will happen to the person at some point in the future. So you'll be looking at wellbeing and supporting them again and because that's the nature of, life and interaction and part of being a human. So we very much took the view that we would write our wellbeing strategy and we would have it over a sort of four year period. And when we looked at it, we took that very phased approach. So our first year was really about let's have an introduction to wellbeing and let's run some events, let's do some things and then our second year is let's embed some of that thinking and let's get feedback from people to support that in-bedding and then I think yeah, kind of next year which is the year that we're in now is around about what new initiatives can we do, what new thinking is coming up for us, where you know what are other organizations doing, kind of being a bit curious about some of those things. So one of the things we've done is introduce, for example, a coaching service, so that you might think well that what's it got to do with wellbeing so that's really just maybe coaching people for an issue that they have around how they do things in the workplace. But actually no, it the coaching service is about supporting people in any aspect of their working life or any aspect of their life. So it's about what can we do and constantly thinking about that. And then I think in our final, year, which will be the year after next and bear in mind, like on an academic calendar rather than I can't, you know, rather than a calendar year for us it will be about engaging with the staff even more than we have been. I'm and saying what? What's worked? What's not worked? What do we want to do? And then also thinking and having conversations with our board and our people and Culture committee to say, how are we gonna better measure the impacts? How are we gonna better do those things? And because I also think we we've run wellbeing festivals, we've got quite a lot of things in place now. But I suspect over time, they may get stale for people. Oh not another wellbeing festival. You know where they're gonna do something on menopause, or they're gonna talk about whatever. And you know, how do we make that fresh for people? So we do engage all the time with people who attend and also people who don't. But I think in that's that kind of phased approach that I think you need to have and you do need to have dialogue with the people and your colleagues who may be attending events. But it's really key that you're also engage with people who are not. And that can be quite challenging because obviously if they're not engaging in the festivals and then you come along and say well I'd like to engage with you about where you're not engaging on them, that is a challenge. But how? It's, so it's about how do we do all of that. So we talked to the unions, for example, one of the big challenges we have is that we've got our group of people who work on a timetable because that they're in classes. So how do we make sure that the events and things that we hold are in at times when they can engage as much as people who perhaps have a bit more flexibility, not myself, can. All of these things gotta be thought about, but I think having a long term strategy, having a real vision about your purpose, what you wanna achieve, what the outcomes are and setting that in a 2,3, 4 year framework and constantly reviewing and thinking what's new, you know, researching what's new out there, what can we bring in, what are we learning, being open minded to, that kind of curiosity is really important and looking at with a view of your sector. So we all, I don't know about you, but I find quite a lot of organizations only look to their own sector. So if we've got a problem, we'll go. What are other colleges doing? What are the universities doing? What are other people doing? But actually, maybe the question should be, you know, what is that really large organization doing that bank that's international or what is it that that small company is doing so that you can be curious and lookout. Benjamin Ellis Yeah. OK. I guess a slow version of agile. I mean, that's the principle of agile is you. You know you make your steps. You do your measurement, you learn an iterate. It's doing that at a bigger loop. I guess you know, do that over 2, 3, 4 year period because it does, my observation on wellbeing is it does take quite a while to work out what is working well and what isn't because there are so many different factors in like just because somebody's not engaging doesn't mean that that's not working that could you know that could be a cultural barrier, organizational culture barrier haven't quite hit the right point to get people to engage with that. It doesn't mean you've got the wrong mechanism. Just might need packaging differently, or actually maybe you have got completely the wrong mechanism, so it is quite a slow process to figure out what. What of these things are working and then pick apart why? Why did that not work maybe quite the way that we thought or why didn't that have the impact that we thought? I do like that idea as well as going to the covering both groups, those people engaging and those people who are not to give you that kind of understanding because there's always a danger with these things that you change something trying to improve it. Zelda Franklin-Hills Mm-hmm. Benjamin Ellis And in that removing the thing that was that was good about it, which always life challenging. Zelda Franklin-Hills Yeah. No, absolutely. Umm. And we have, you know, one of the things that I'm gonna be really interested about is about our participation rates and because we have around about 48-49% participation rate but I do worry that if we continue to do some of the things that we're doing in the format that we're doing, then we might see that that participation drop off and it is just constantly asking yourself questions and looking at your data and looking what things are telling you and using you know your employee engagement survey data to tell you things. And looking at everything that you've got and using your community groups, if you've got them, you know using your wellbeing champions, whatever they happen to be to kind of get that information, to help inform your longer term vision. And because I think wellbeing needs to be seen over a period of years, not just one thing I'm gonna do today and then it's OK. And so a bit like agile working or smarter working, you know we're moving away from that binary choice of home or work. And then I can see that developing even further. So it's not just homework, but it could be any you know, any campus and any college, but then we might start to say, well, actually could be anywhere and we provide you the equipment to do that. So I think these things are evolutionary. You need to see it like that, but you've got to start somewhere. That's my other thing. Get your strategy. Get your purpose. Think about it. Think about what you're going to do over a long period of time. Get that investment, persuade people, and then really show them through outcome and impact how it's making a difference. Benjamin Ellis I like that. That's very sage advice to end on. Thank you very much for your time today it is appreciated and you're sharing your wisdom with us. Zelda Franklin-Hills Thanks very much for inviting me.