Following on from our well-attended first HR Leader Wellbeing roundtable in London in April 2024, the group wanted to come back together as soon as possible to continue the discussion and investigation into the “Strategic Importance of the HR Leaders Own Wellbeing”.
The group this time was a mixture of returning participants and new attendees, coming to their first roundtable. Our venue was in More London, facing Tower Bridge to give us some excellent inspiration for our discussions.
If our first roundtable had set the scene, this one started to focus a bit more on how this roundtable could support HR Leaders by looking at three “altitudes” with respect to us, as HR Professionals, our HR function and the organisation as a whole. Siobhan Sheridan, co-chair of the HR Leaders’ Wellbeing roundtable shared a meta-research piece by Christina Maslach, one of the key academics in the field of burnout in recent years. The group were introduced to the six areas of burnout and the article by Maslach on reversing the effects of burnout. These six key areas are:
1) Workload
2) Control
3) Reward/Recognition
4) Community
5) Fairness
6) Values
The group found that they had little impact on the volume of workload that HR Leaders were subjected to, however there were actions that could be taken in the other five areas to mitigate this and possibly reduce the sense of overwhelm that the group could all relate to.
The final part of the roundtable then explored the concept of primary, secondary and tertiary interventions for wellbeing activities. Small group discussions revealed that, as HR leaders, we were sucked into the tertiary and secondary interventions with the organisations, often driven by our own feelings of overwhelm, yet we almost unanimously agreed that primary wellbeing interventions were what our people needed from our HR Leader positions – could it be that our own wellbeing DOES impact strategically on the organisation?
Our time together quickly ran out and the group agreed to try and get another discussion in by the summer break. This has now been scheduled for Thursday 18th July from 08:30 to 10:00 in a central London location.
All participants who have attended a roundtable get access to a shared community collaboration board of the materials we use and wider reading articles.
If you are interested, you can read about our first roundtable HERE. If you are an HR leader and you want to join these discussions to support your own, your HR function, or the organisation’s wellbeing then you can sign up HERE and we would love to see you at the third “Strategic Importance of the HR Leader’s Own Wellbeing” roundtable soon.
In addition, if you wanted to talk on a more 1-2-1 basis on your own wellbeing as an HR Leader, feel free to contact me at anthony@tapdsolutions.com.
