Over the last year the University has been continuing to develop the wellbeing offering for our people.  We want a healthy workplace, for everyone.  A workplace where we can enable our employees to look after their own physical and psychological health, supported with activities, initiatives and learning – and where managers understand their important role to play in creating such environments.

This last year we have trying a range of activities as we try to understand what people are interested in.  So far this year we have set up a network of wellbeing champions who help us to promote our wellbeing messages across the university.  We’ve launched our workshop ‘Thrive’ which runs both as an open programme through Staff Learning and Development, or on demand at conferences or events.  Thrive is a 90 minute invitation to take time out of the day to reflect about where your wellbeing is – and what you might want to work on.  There’s also a version for teams, to help them explore how they are working well together – or not.

We’ve held a wellbeing fair, a menopause event, and launched a series of wellbeing lectures (more of these are coming up – see the links below).  We’ve also started workshops for managers on their role in wellbeing, as well as how to manage and support flexible working.  There have been workshops on sleep and energy, and we have launched 121 wellbeing coaching with eight specially trained coaches.  We also have a wellbeing blog – find it here.

There is much still to do.

We want to get people talking about wellbeing, especially mental health.  We particularly want to help our people managers understand the critical role they play in wellbeing, and empower them to have the right conversations with their teams.  We are building a calendar of events for next year; there will be more wellbeing lectures, more manager training, more events.  We are also working to promote flexible working across the university, as well as improve our policies and supporting activities for working families.

We have a request; tell us what you believe would make a difference to your wellbeing at work.  We can’t promise to tackle everything all at once, but we are genuinely committed to helping everyone work well at Manchester.

You can contact us at wellbeing@manchester.ac.uk

Our upcoming wellbeing lectures are:

Wellbeing and Place

Resilience and Strengths

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