South Wales Police introduced a monthly wellness café to bring the workforce together to discuss hot issues around personal resilience and wellbeing. Open to all employees, the café is also recorded and shared on the wellbeing portal for easy access post event, along with a brief written summary of discussions.
How it works
The wellness café is facilitated by our internal engagement manager and led by two occupational health counsellors who share advice and guidance on the issues raised by officers and staff. Hosted on Microsoft Teams, we also utilise Slido to help encourage engagement from those who may wish to remain anonymous or are too shy to ask questions via the chat function.
To understand key issues of concern, we have an ongoing Slido survey where staff can submit what topics they would like to see featured and share a star rating on how they are feeling during that month. This enables us to theme the sessions appropriately and to pick up on any underlying issues that may be of concern and that require greater focus.
The sessions are an hour long and take place on the second Wednesday of the month utilising a standard Teams link that is shared on our intranet.
We do not record attendance via a booking system, it’s a virtual open surgery, and we encourage promotion through our local health and wellbeing champions to ensure attendance from all corners of the force. The discussions are incredibly impactive and the chat function is always busy with officers and staff sharing their own tips and advice on the topics that are being discussed. As a result, we create a short summary that features top tips from our counsellors as well as advice from attendees on how to improve your wellbeing. We record the session and save all the resources to our wellbeing portal and so the café is another method of driving traffic to our support pages
Top tips for implementation
Tip 1
Engage the workforce to inform the topics of each session.
Tip 2
Use in house expertise to lead discussion and to share legitimate occupational health advice.
Tip 3
Try and encourage the more introverted individuals to participate by using a platform that captures anonymous feedback.
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Links to resources
Personal resilience
Download document
Sleep
Download document
Benefits of lockdown
Download document
Contact local force for more information