Name
Jay Spence
Job title
CEO, Founder
Organisation
What are you/your organisation currently focussing on in terms of workplace health and wellbeing?
Flexible working.
Aligning personal strengths with role definition (job design).
Eating together in teams.
What aspect of workplace health and wellbeing does your organisation do well in?
Mental health stigma reduction and open conversations, looking out for team members and assisting them to take mental health time out to prevent stress/fatigue.
What’s your biggest challenge working in workplace health and wellbeing?
20% of our team work remotely so we need programs that can be done asynchronously.
How does Way Ahead Workplaces add value to your organisations health and wellbeing program?
Facilitating and supporting a great network of employers, experts and providers.
Advocacy for the importance of wellbeing at work.
Stigma busting and promoting healthy conversations about mental health in particular.
How do you deal with stress?
- Daily meditation.
- A lot of reading books by people who have achieved the highest levels of happiness I think possible.
- Enrolling into courses that are focused on different self-growth topics.
- Exercise and diet.
- Prioritising relationships when having to make choices.
- Fostering honesty and authenticity in my close friendships and relationships.
What are the key issues and considerations for people in workplace health and wellbeing roles?
Understanding the complexity of stigma and how it can operate completely unconsciously as a stereotype.
Confidentiality and how to navigate employee needs for privacy balanced with decisions for the business.
Evaluation of what works and what doesn’t work in promoting wellbeing (evaluating evidence)
How do you switch off from work?
Forgiving myself and not feeling guilty for whether I’m switched on or switched off.
What is your best time saving tip?
Starting and stopping work at a regular time every day keeps me conscious that I have to get the work done by a set time.
Prioritising using Trello then using a Pomodoro timer to work in 30-60 minute blocks and keeping complex work for the mornings.
What do you think the future of work health and wellness programs look like?
Large de-identified wellbeing datasets. Data mining on the data to find patterns of what works to enhance wellbeing for who and when to do it. Developing algorithms from the patterns, using the algorithms to create more data. Creating a self-learning loop from data to mining to algorithms to more data that improves over time.
