National Work Life Week: Prioritising holistic wellbeing

In Channel Eye’s final article for National Work Life Week, Céline Willing and Khalil Rener of Rener Wellbeing highlight the importance of holistic wellbeing for achieving work-life balance. They share strategies to help individuals and organizations prioritize mental, physical, and emotional health, emphasizing the need to understand personal wellbeing baselines to sustain long-term productivity and balance

Achieving a sustainable balance means focusing on holistic wellbeing – caring for your mental, physical, and emotional health in ways that work for you. This means being aware of how you feel, understanding how you want to feel, and taking actionable steps to get there. It also means coming back to your baseline in adverse situations.

National Work Life Week is the perfect time to reflect on how to manage the pressures of both work and personal life, and together with this year’s theme of World Mental Health Day ‘Prioritising Mental Health in the Workplace’, it becomes very relevant for many of us.

Managing our ways of working, building self-care routines, and making wellbeing a priority are essential to maintaining productivity, performance, and happiness both personally and professionally. Here’s how you can approach wellbeing more holistically:

Recognising your emotional baseline

A crucial part of maintaining balance is understanding your own wellbeing baseline and how you want to be feeling. Without being aware of what ‘wellbeing’ means to you and how you want to feel, it is hard to then know which steps to take to improve and maintain your overall wellbeing and balance. So, we invite you to become more aware of how you want to feel – which may be a difficult question to answer.

To become more aware of how you want to feel, firstly ask yourself ‘how am I feeling right now?’. Is this an easy question to answer? Is it something you ask yourself regularly, multiple times a day as you ebb and flow? Once you have an answer, it is important not to judge how you are feeling. No matter whether your answer is ‘tired’, or ‘happy’, or ‘amazing’ – you are comparing that feeling to something, i.e. your baseline.

Now ask yourself, ‘how would I like to be feeling right now?’. This answer can change depending on the situation you are in, such as when you are presenting to your SLT, compared to when you are at home with your family. Are you aware of the preventative steps you can take day-in and day-out to help you stay at your baseline, and steps to take in moments when you are feeling away from how you want to feel?

And do you actually take those steps? Understanding your baseline is the first step to knowing when and how to course-correct, preventing burnout and promoting long-term wellbeing.

Here are some more practical tools you can implement, as preventive measures, as well as reactionary measures:

Sustainable, holistic wellbeing practices: Find what works for you

Creating a personalised wellbeing action plan, with interventions that stick, isn’t just about following trends. It’s about finding activities that fit seamlessly into your lifestyle, that you enjoy, and that help you come back to your physical and emotional baseline. Wellbeing is personal, with no one-size-fits-all answer.

We have seen the wellbeing scores of many organisations improve after their employees go through a ‘Develop Your Personalised Wellbeing Action Plan’ workshop – where they are facilitated to make action plans around their mental and emotional health, sleep, physical activity, nutrition and more. The action plans follow a template covering:

• Barriers
• Enablers
• Actions
• Benefits the actions will bring.

Some practical strategies for maintaining personal balance

Staying balanced, especially during busy periods, requires actionable strategies. Here are some practical tips that individuals and organisations can adopt to maintain a healthy work-life balance:

• Set clear boundaries or be clear on your work-life blend: Define when work stops and personal time begins, especially if working from home. If you prefer having a work-life blend where there are no clear boundaries, be clear on moments where you may put your tech to one side, such as when you are at dinner, with family or on a walk.
• Perform regular self-check-ins: Be aware of how you’re feeling day-to-day and adjust when necessary.
• Create a wellbeing routine: Incorporate activities you enjoy into your daily schedule so that self-care becomes second nature. For example, a mixture of the following:
  • Journaling or speaking to a trusted person about your wellbeing.
  • Creative activities.
  • Socialising and volunteering.
  • Mindfulness and other tools (e.g. box breathing, visualisation, self-talk).
  • Exercise / movement – something is better than nothing.
  • Sleep 7-9 hours of good quality sleep a night.
• Ask for help when needed: Build a support system – whether it’s a manager, mentor, professional – and reach out when you need assistance.

Managing ways of working for better wellbeing

Workload management is a critical aspect of workplace wellbeing and a sense of balance.

Often, the cocktail of heavy workloads and a sense of little time/resources contribute to feelings of stress and exhaustion, but this can be mitigated by addressing the root causes of these pressures. When workloads feel overwhelming, it’s important to assess whether the issue is the volume of tasks or whether it stems from other issues.

It is important to recognise that workplace wellbeing is a journey, not a destination

Conducting workload audits is a valuable place to start to gain insight into these root causes. Organisations who have carried out these audits, and taken steps to address issues, identify reductions in self-reported stress levels and workloads feeling too high, often before making changes to the actual amount of work:

• Identify role and task clarity per person.
• Understand how clear employees are on task prioritisation.
• Analyse the amount of time spent on high priority tasks versus low priority tasks.
• Determine the number of hours worked per day.
• Assess whether employees feel they have enough time and resources to complete high/low priority tasks.
• Evaluate the autonomy of choosing where/how they work.
• Examine the number of distractions affecting essential work, such as unrequired meetings, emails, and internal communications messages.
• Ensure workload balancing by distributing tasks fairly among team members based on skill sets, capacity, and workload capacity.
• Identify tasks that can be automated or streamlined to reduce workload.

Workplace Wellbeing: A win-win for individuals and organisations

It is important to recognise that workplace wellbeing is a journey, not a destination. It’s about knowing how to come back to your emotional baseline, managing workloads effectively, and developing routines that support both your personal and professional life. By prioritising wellbeing, you invest in a healthier future one where you can thrive both at work and at home.

Now is the time to start thinking about your own wellbeing and that of your employees. In short, organisations that make mental health and balanced workloads a priority, foster a culture of resilience, innovation, and success.

Khalil Rener (main picture) and Céline Willing are key members of the team at Rener Wellbeing, a workplace wellbeing consultancy, working with organisations of all sizes including JT Global, Intertrust Group (part of CSC), through to the NHS and startups, providing tailored wellbeing training sessions, wellbeing data analysis and strategy development, as well as 1-2-1 support.  Khalil, Founder and Director, has a robust background in sport and exercise science, holding both a BSc and an MSc with Distinction from Loughborough University. Céline, originally from Jersey, boasts a First-class MA from the University of Edinburgh and has studied at The Sorbonne.

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