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Thrive at Work project team

Before starting work on your well-being strategy, it will be useful to establish your Thrive at Work project team. Distributing tasks and responsibilities across the project team will help ensure the success of the project.

Your Thrive at Work team will be responsible for a range of activities over the project period, including

  • evaluating existing mental health strategies,
  • strategically planning and prioritising mental health and well-being activities,
  • gathering and reviewing organisational metrics and designing, disseminating and analysing employee perception data, and
  • tracking progress and the effectiveness of activities across the organisation.

Identify the team

When establishing the Thrive at Work project team, there are two approaches that can be taken; you can form a new team, or task an existing committee or working party with driving the project. When establishing a new team, it will be beneficial to draw individuals from across different functions/departments, with differing levels of authority. By taking a cross-functional approach, specialised knowledge, practices and procedures, and data on mental health from across the organisation will be uncovered. This ensures a more comprehensive evaluation of mental health in your workplace, prevents overlapping work being completed, and streamlines the process through effective use of time, resources, knowledge and skills. It is also important that members with decision making authority are included to ensure that decisions made by the team can be implemented.

Many organisations will have existing governance structures that can take responsibility for the Thrive at Work project (for example: a well-being committee or an Occupational Safety and Health working party). However, as above, it is vital that the team has members from a range of functions with differing levels of authority. If this is not the case, consider inviting additional members to maximise the effectiveness of the project.

Consultation and buy-in

When presenting the business case to the team undertaking the Thrive at Work project and ultimately senior leadership, it is important to be properly prepared. Consider all the detail that is needed for key stakeholders to understand what the Thrive at Work project is, the benefits that it brings, and what needs to be done to implement it. By stepping people through the process and ensuring they have a clear understanding, you are more likely to be successful. If key stakeholders do not understand the benefit, exactly what will be done, and how much time it will take, they will be unlikely to approve or be motivated to complete the project.

Committing resources

Once the business case has been accepted and senior leadership has committed to your Thrive at Work initiative, you will need to consider the resources required to sustain engagement with the process. Planning the financial, human and other resources as early as possible is helpful to ensure adequate resources, maintain momentum, and increase the chance of success.

All staff working on the Thrive at Work project should have dedicated time for meetings and other work relevant to the preparation, evaluation, planning and tracking of well-being activities. It is important that the time allocated to the project forms part of the individuals’ current workload, and is not an addition to their workload.

Next step

Get employee support

Once your organisation's leadership team have committed to the development of a strategy to improve workplace well-being, it will be critical to build support with employees.