What is Well-being?
Well-being is how comfortable, happy, and healthy we are throughout our lives. It’s not just how we feel day to day, it’s much more than that.
We like keeping things simple here at Arthur Ellis and our own well-being can be broken down into five areas of behaviour that help us to build and protect our well-being. Like how brushing our teeth helps our teeth keep nice and healthy, there five types of behaviour that goes towards keeping us in that state of feeling comfortable, healthy, and happy.
These five different areas of well-being have been researched a huge amount to understand their benefits. The New Economic Foundation reviewed over 400 scientific papers to see what are the typical trends that helps people get their mental health and well-being back on track.
These positive areas of behaviour form our bananas. At Arthur Ellis, we use these different areas of well-being to help you as a business mitigate the risks of poor mental health and well-being.
The Arthur Ellis Bananas & Doughnuts
We developed the Arthur Ellis Bananas and Doughnuts as a method to simplify the principles of early intervention and working in a preventative way.
It helps us to compliment your business strategy by looking at the behaviours that drive positive well-being whilst understanding the vulnerabilities to build in preventative ways of working which develops a preventative approach rather than firefighting issues and risks when they arise.
Well-being must not only be a priority but it needs to consistently evolve throughout the year so that when changes happen, which could be a re-structure, transitioning to working at home or in the office or even seasonal changes to support the wellness and effectiveness of your people.
Our bananas and doughnuts help us understand the impacts these changes may have on your people and what risks may present themselves and as a result, we can help you establish an evolving preventative plan.
Bananas
Bananas
Imagine if your people were to have a banana every day…you would only get healthier!
They are each getting all of those amazing nutrients, vitamins and minerals that they need. They will have more energy and over time their health will only improve.
This is exactly the same when it comes to mental health and well-being. Our bananas form our protection against the different challenges we may face in life whether it’s an intense deadline, client relationships through to personal challenges like seasonal changes or relationships.
How we spend our time is like what we are eating. If we are spending our days doing banana behaviours, our brains are getting what they need to help us remain in control of our well-being, emotional and mental health.
Doughnuts
Doughnuts
Behaviours are exactly the same and the different changes that happen throughout the year in business can begin to lead people to indulge more and more or sacrifice our banana behaviours, replacing them with doughnuts. Think about a really busy project when people experience burnout, they aren’t doing their bananas and doughnuts take over steadily but surely making them unwell.
We all have those things we like to do as an indulgence, whether it is scrolling through social media or binge watching our favourite series but if our doughnuts begin to over take our bananas, our well-being and mental health will slowly be affected.
Behaviours are exactly the same and the different changes that happen throughout the year in business can begin to lead people to indulge more and more or sacrifice our banana behaviours, replacing them with doughnuts. Think about a really busy project when people experience burnout, they aren’t doing their bananas and doughnuts take over steadily but surely making them unwell.
We all have those things we like to do as an indulgence, whether it is scrolling through social media or binge watching our favourite series but if our doughnuts begin to over take our bananas, our well-being and mental health will slowly be affected.
Managing Well-being in Business
Our bananas and doughnuts can and will be impacted as we go throughout the year. When we support with strategies, we look at the impact of change across three levels.
Business – changes that impact the whole business like seasonal changes, office moves or working from home.
Teams – changes that impact certain teams like restructuring, management changes or specific projects.
Individual – changes that impact individuals, this could be certain people within teams going through challenging life events or have long term illness.
We manage these by looking at what bananas may be impacted.
Your Teams Banana Behaviours
Move
Focus
Discover
Communicate
Help
Have you ever become really busy at work and missed that lunchtime walk? Maybe you have had a really long week and when we put our feet up on a Friday, the last thing we want to do is exercise so we order a takeaway and question why Netflix are asking us if we want to ‘continue watching’…OF COURSE WE DO! But, something that simple can begin to have a negative impact over time.
When our lives become disrupted by these different life events, we aren’t often able to keep these positive Five a Day banana behaviours going.
We are by no means saying that this is a bad thing to do, but these are our doughnuts, those indulgent behaviours that are fine from time to time but if we are having them every day, we will start to see our health decline.
By first designing a strategy around the Arthur Ellis Five a Day, we can begin to see where things might be impacted throughout our working year for the whole business, teams and individuals.
By combining our Strategic work with Well-being Activities directed towards your staff, we can align positive education throughout the workplace to help people emphasise their bananas and keep an eye on their indulgent, doughnut behaviours.
The activity is designed to train up 80 people in 1 hour in our banana and doughnut principles.
The price starts at £500 plus VAT but may vary depending on how many you would like to book. We are also happy to discuss pricing with not-for-profit and charities.
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Where does Mental Health come in?
As mental health is a state of well-being, our mental health begins to decline when the way we think starts to impact our day to day activities. Mainly, those positive day to day activities we do that have a positive impact on our well-being, our bananas. Put this together over a long period of time or a difficult period in our lives then we don’t have that protection in place and it feels like it’s just going to get worse.
Mental health is often demonstrated across a spectrum but we prefer to use a wave. This demonstrates the typical ups and downs of life that we all experience. The purple lines show our banana behaviours (check out our well-being page to find out more about our bananas).
If those purple lines (our banana behaviours) are our barriers against poor mental health and if we are experiencing difficulties, we will probably recognise that somewhere along the way, our bananas have become disrupted or something has happened that has stopped us doing them. If this has happened, we are at risk of our doughnuts taking over and getting stuck in a rut.
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By combining our Strategic work with Well-being Activities directed towards your staff, we can align positive education throughout the workplace to help people emphasise their bananas and keep an eye on their indulgent, doughnut behaviours.
The activity is designed to train up 80 people in 1 hour in our banana and doughnut principles.
The price starts at £500 plus VAT but may vary depending on how many you would like to book. We are also happy to discuss pricing with not-for-profit and charities.
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To help us keep our 1:1 service as cost effective as possible and as accessible as possible, visit our online shop to help us keep supporting children, youg people and vulnerable adults.
