A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a health and wellbeing conference in Birmingham. Moreover I was asked to speak twice and to chair a whole day of sessions. It is always good to be asked to do these sort of things, and being a chair is more than just keeping to time. Although in my speaking I did see some chairing that was really quite intense over time management! For me the responsibility is to make the speakers feel at ease, be interested and to always ask questions. I do this to get debate going and to make the audience feel they can ask questions too. It is always odd to me that people attend conferences and leave with questions unanswered, or see nothing in a presentation to ask questions about. I presented on Financial Counselling in the workplace. This is an area I have been researching for a couple of years now, and although not an authority, I would like to think I know much more than most about. I read quite a number of papers on the subject at the beginning of my interest a couple of years ago. It's mostly from the USA, but still has relevance. In the UK employers do need to understand that employees can and will be distracted by personal financial problems, and that for many their understanding of financial issues and choices is poor, and that finding information and advice is difficult. Here is where good employers can help, its simple really.
My other presentation was about Emotional Intelligence in Stress Management. This is not an expert area for me, I have read enough to understand how it could be used. My proposition was that "traditional" stress management courses are somewhat bland, and do not seem to have moved on very much. I was designing these 10 years ago and little has changed. If we used EI within a resilience model of coping, it would help managers to manage themselves and others better, and thus become better managers. Sensitivity to feelings and emotions doesn't seem to be a comfortable discussion are in the UK, yet research shows that this makes for better managers and better performance. This approach has to be better for business than tick-box stress management. I had about 15 questions after my presentation, and people came up to me to say it was one of the better presentations. So I had some agreement on a way forward, thats good to know. My position was arrived at only by thinking more about how I might combine EI with stress management. What else is out there that we could creatively combine to assist with health and wellbeing?
