Young people and jobs

The Princes Trust raise some very important points about how being without work can affect young people. Our society presents many pressures for young people, to belong, to posses, to participate, to contribute. This would be hard enough, but without work the pressure is even greater. Today the Princes Trust has published a significant insight into how being jobless affects our young people. The effects are profound, lack of identity, insomnia, family breakdown, self harm, depression and suicide. These are not things we should be proud of as a society, and not things we should accept for

The difference in happiness and confidence between those in work and education and those who are not are stark. What I see are young people who do want opportunity and without this there is an underlying hopelessness, this isn't the reaction of people who don't want to work, who don't want to contribute. We have to try to help younger people to get into work and education, I don't see how the current government is doing this with its cut backs, and the increase in tuition fees. It is organisations like the Princes Trust that seem to be trying most. What are large corporate organisations doing to help? They have opportunities for young people, they also have skilled people who could mentor and support young people.

They are our future.

The whole report is here http://www.princes-trust.org.uk/pdf/Youth_Index_jan2011.pdf

Wellness or Wellbeing

I had an interesting request the other day to review a wellbeing policy. Great I thought, and loaded the document from Outlook. The reading was, I thought quite painful. Why I hear you ask, well, it was because the author had used wellness throughout the document, with an occasional wellbeing thrown in. For me they are not interchangeable, wellness is part of wellbeing. It's on the continuum of health from illness to wellness. The policy was aimed at a corporate client, but failed to understand many of the basics. Firstly policy sets out intention and direction, the "work" to implement follows and is the actions that result. Such actions follow the policy.

Making organisations responsible for wellness is a tall order, but it is possible within wellbeing.

The words we use are important, many words used in the wellbeing arena are of the wrong intention, they signal power and often show contradiction.

Be careful with the words!

Global Wellbeing

I went to a session at the Work Foundation the other week, one of the banks was presenting their wellbeing program. There was nothing earth shattering in the program, it had all the things you might expect, PMI, HRA, portal, on-site promotions, EAP. For me what was most important was that wellbeing had become a culture, just as safety has become a culture. It shows that organisations can achieve great things without massive work and that a wellbeing culture can exist. Making someone responsible for it has massive advantages, as the work actually gets done.

Their biggest challenge was making it global. What they didnt have was data on what was out there across their global business, and performance stats. This is a big problem that i have seen many times globally and in the UK. Without data its all uphill. Absence is a base metric that an organisation must understand, it drives so much else. It shows the culture and attitude, management approach and solution focus. From good absence data an organisation can begin to undertsand itself and look to resolve any problems in their health management.