We had a fantastic time working in collaboration with Charlie Hodgson, former England Rugby star who now spends his time working with individuals and organisations to optimise health and performance using science-backed lifestyle assessments and coaching. Discussions covered a range of key issues in the workplace including; improving resilience and the importance of looking at employee well-being from an individual, team and organisational perspectives.
Christian Hughes, CEO of MyPeople Group is a Psychologist who has worked with some of Britain’s greatest Olympians and sportsmen and women, supporting the analysis of culture within teams to understand how this impacts individual and organisational performance. During the session he revealed how social capital, resilience and team cohesion play a huge part in well-being in the workplace and the potential affect it has on performance.
Christian commented: “If you are responsible for an organisation’s well-being or you have a certain amount of influence in this area, you need to be looking at these variables from multiple perspectives. At an individual level, how many techniques, tools and capabilities do you imbue people with? On a team level, what is the strength of the relationships within that group (social capital) or in other words, the emotional scaffolding that supports that group?”
“Whenever a cluster of people or individuals are faced with an obstacle, our instinctive response is to want to share this experience with others,” continued Christian. “Having a strong social capital bond and team cohesion helps employees handle these tough situations.”
Further discussions included the importance of understanding factors such as psychological safety and organisational capital (How invested everyone is in the organisation), which provides early warning signs of mental health or well-being issues.
Understanding and managing mental health in high pressure environments enables people to build resilience, improve performance and strengthens abilities for coping with challenges. Charlie Hodgson gave a very honest account of his personal experience with stress management and offered five practical techniques for coping with stress, that can easily be adopted in any workplace to help individuals overcome ‘in the moment anxiety’:
- Control the controllables – Take inventory of how you spend your time, who you spend it with and what you focus your attention towards – Don’t worry about external influences you can’t control.
- Have perspective – Don’t be self-critical, strip the problem back to basics and target a solution one step at a time by looking for the good in the situation.
- The power of positivity – Remove yourself from negative situations and people that can drag your energy down.
- Switch off, relax and rest – It’s essential to carve some time out for rest and recuperation so remove any social media distractions and make more ‘me’ time.
- Breathe consciously – Breathing correctly is the single most important intervention you can make for your own health to control your rhythm.
As a direct result of the positive feedback we received from attendees, MyPeople is now planning a follow up workshop event in March. We will explore cognitive behavioural strategies we’ve leveraged from sport and data that can be deployed within your own organisation to highlight what’s really impacting performance.
