Hosts: Public Service Futures

Venue: Online via Teams

Date: 22 March 2023

Attendance: Approx. 50

Presenters:

Ryan Meachen (Ngāti Te Wehi (Tainui) and Ngāti Huia (Raukawa-ki-te-Tonga) –
Continuum Consulting Group

Stop telling me to meditate and eat fruit: what really matters for workplace wellbeing and resilience?

Ryan shared a humorous and relatable webinar on what the evidence tells us about what is effective for workplace wellbeing. With increasing focus on the importance of wellbeing, this was a timely topic and armed participants with some strategies to ensure our young and early career public servants are set up to have a long and successful career. A huge thank you to Ryan and those that joined, particularly our PSF members and friends from other cross-agency ELN’s!

Key takeaways

• Your wellbeing is an outcome of the interaction between you as individual and environmental context you're in. Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to changing life experiences and competing demands.
• Nurturing wellbeing requires focus on both individual AND environmental factors.
• The number one strategy to enhance individual resilience and renewal is exercise! Other strategies include mindfulness, creative expression, connection, and spiritual practices.
• Variety and dosage are important enablers of holistic wellbeing – science says variety and more frequent, shorter duration activities are most effective.
• Individual strategies are only half of the equation. Ryan also shared some helpful mental models to help us recognise and cultivate resilience and wellbeing in the workplace through building resilient teams.
• Team strategies included building a culture of psychological safety and trust across teams through intentional relationship building, high impact activities, and looking for opportunities for values alignment or new ways of working that enhance individual and collective resilience and wellbeing.

Feedback from attendees

It was great to see wellbeing as a multidimensional journey.

It was really good to have such an open and honest presenter. Very friendly and 'at our level'.

It was great to gain a deeper understanding of the science behind the concept of resilience and why its so important for wellbeing.

Really well facilitated, felt like a safe space to ask questions. Well done PSF team!

Ryan is a great presenter. He was clear, concise and his pace in presentation was great.