Last week, Lawrence attended The Watercooler conference and exhibition.
"The Watercooler is for professionals who focus on workplace and wellbeing, HR, mental health, and employee culture, from all sizes of organisation—coming together to discover ideas, solutions and practical takeaways, that enable you to deliver healthy workplace culture and wellbeing programmes, for your employees to thrive."
What is the Watercooler Event about?
It was something I spotted online and thought it was a great opportunity to learn more within the wellbeing space. It is a conference/exhibition where wellbeing professionals go to learn more about how they can provide better wellbeing solutions for their employees. Everyone from insurance companies, mental health support services and technology companies that can offer different ways of providing support.
Why did you want to go?
As the team grows within MorePeople and being Mental Health Champion/First Aider internally, I wanted to learn more and also find out how we can support our team, and ensure that we have pathways for everyone, so that there are no barriers for someone who is wanting/in need of support.
Now having been and learnt a lot, I think there are so many different needs of individuals that can sometimes go under the radar when it comes to wellbeing. The current barriers are sometimes too restrictive and put people off seeking that support.
What are the purpose of wellbeing services in the work place?
Wellbeing is not only just supporting mental health, but is everything from Physical, Social, ED&I and Financial. Sometimes things that are just thought as a given, can be sometimes the best forms of support. Something we already have in place at MorePeople is having free membership to the Gym. Something I have learnt personally and reinforced from that day, is that exercise and physical health can absolutely help with Mental Health, so looking at it as a whole is massively important.
Within any workplace (and very much so in Recruitment), there can be at times high levels of stress, followed by great euphoria, which can raise some real issues, so identifying this and having plans, systems and support networks in place, can ultimately ensure that your employees come to work happy and leave happy.
Something that was spoken a lot about and putting is specifically into the context of business, is if you support wellbeing, as a business, productivity increases. Therefore supporting those that work for/with you, the business will ultimately see a greater engagement and outcome from their teams.
What talks did you go to?
Across the day, I went to:
-Tackling Mental Health Challenges head on
-Why Line Managers are the wrong people to manage employee health and wellbeing
-Embedding a culture of wellbeing
-Your toolkit for better-built wellbeing and performance
-How to make the case for better mental health support services.
In and around this, I met with some fantastic businesses who were exhibiting that provide a variety of different services that we might be able to use in the future.
Fundamentally though, the biggest lesson I learnt is that you have to start this journey somewhere, and then build on strong foundations to what you want to achieve, so hopefully we can take this away and make some great steps forward here at MorePeople.
