It was the mad rush to the end of the financial year. We were in the midst of both closing the books for the year AND delivering a major piece in our project about measuring the outcomes in the military justice system in the Australian Defence Force. Our eyes were all spinning around the wrong way from fatigue. Just as we were thinking fondly of a frosty G&T, someone asked:
‘Is the wellbeing of workers in one workplace really any different from the wellbeing of workers in another workplace?’ With a sad flashback to my early life as an economist, I was temped to say something really definitive like: ‘On average, all other things being equal, probably not, but, on the other hand, it could be, depending on how prescriptively, or not, you define wellbeing.’
Fortunately, I was saved from over-consuming my share of the commas in the world (and uttering an egregiously complex sentence) by my working life of more recent years.
How? It’s simple. Clients of our business are from an array of industries, and we bring them a multidisciplinary team. Working together infects us all with each other’s frames of reference, such as the different analytical approaches of a whole schmerl of other professions.
To some degree, we each benefit by becoming multi-lingual in the professional lingua franca of each other’s work (not to mention, multi-lingual in coffee!) Good example: our learning from scientists, engineers, psychologists, sociologists and others, the material of which we have brought to bear against a legal backdrop in our work for the Australian Defence Force. (For that project, go to the Clients section or to read more about the sociologist bits, see the article ‘Can’t buy me wellbeing’.)
So my answer was actually: ‘You bet. Let’s find out what the evidence says about wellbeing in your workforce.’
We are seriously interested in this issue, and would be very keen to have other views to add into our research, so feel free to drop us an email.
Cheers, Carolyn
(PS. You might also like to read more about wellbeing research in Australia, which is a project under the auspices of Deakin University.)