Umbrella Talk About 'New Year Blues'

Robust evidence from academic and business case studies links employee resilience and wellbeing with improved employee engagement, creativity and innovation, talent retention and organisational productivity. Umbrella design the most effective programmes to demonstrate improved business outcomes for their clients.

The academic and scientific rigour they apply to their work with clients also informs their thinking on the latest developments in the fields of wellbeing, resilience, and performance, and as it is already nearly the end of February, they know from experience that many people can go back to work with the ‘New Year Blues’.

So, how do we keep self-care and wellbeing as part of our daily ‘business as usual’? The Umbrella team say, “The psychological literature on behaviour change suggests there are some key ideas that will help to maintain our wellbeing habits (these things will be familiar to anyone who has done an Umbrella Resilience Workshop), and include such things as routines and rituals, having a back-up plan, flexible thinking and expecting lapses, and what to do about them.”

Routines and rituals help us to turn healthy behaviours into habits, increasing the chance they will become automatic, and as we know that motivation follows actions, just getting started can kick-start your motivation. On those days where your wellbeing has been put to the bottom of your ‘to do’ list, what will motivate you the next day?

There will be days your best plans go out the window, so you need to know how you are going to manage your possible lapses. Support and encouragement from others is really important in following through with our behaviour changes, and given that support is one of the top six things that help us maintain our habits, how does this look in our teams?

At Umbrella, they have been reflecting on this question, of how as leaders, and colleagues, we best support one another to prioritise and maintain our wellbeing in the year ahead, and they know it will be a matter of experimenting and trying them out to see what works.  While the research can assist us in understanding what is helpful in maintaining our wellbeing habits, context is critical, so for more information on building resilience, stress management NZ and wellness at work please go to http://umbrella.org.nz .