Our ForUS Board January Update

As we make our way through January and the usual post-Christmas ‘slump’, the FORUS Board have some exciting news! The Board’s been working with Vicki Watson and Gary Woodhall to come up with some initiatives to help us think about and improve our wellbeing all year round.

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what is wellbeing?

Wellbeing can mean different things to different people, but is generally considered to be made up of a number of factors, including physical, emotional, financial and social wellbeing, amongst others. It’s defined as “the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy”, but wellbeing’s a much wider concept which encompasses things like how satisfied people are with their life as a whole, their sense of purpose, and how in control they feel.

Everyone achieves wellbeing in different ways, so we recognise that no individual idea will appeal to all, but by introducing a wide range and variety of wellbeing initiatives, we hope everyone will be able to find something they’re interested in getting involved in.

what have we done so far?

Towards the end of last year, the FORUS board held a lunchtime Teams session with about 30 people from different offices and sectors across Fortus, to gather ideas and find out what wellbeing means to people. We came away with so many ideas it’d be impossible to include them all here, but some of the popular suggestions were vegetable boxes, recipe sharing, lunchtime walks, breakfast smoothies, yoga, bake-off competitions and celebrating achievements. The general consensus was that people wanted to keep it light-hearted and really concentrate on positives, whatever they may be.

what are the next steps?

To put the ideas into action, we’d like to ask for volunteers from every office to form wellbeing teams. Communications will be sent out on this in early February with more details on what this would involve, but our aim’s that the volunteers in each office will work together to support and promote the national wellbeing strategy, to share wellbeing ideas locally, and encourage participation. Don’t worry, this isn’t a huge time commitment! Just a chance for people to share some ideas, have some fun and hopefully go a little way to improve our overall wellbeing.

Various offices are already informally doing some of these things, so we’d love to see a few of these ideas rolled out across the business.

Look out for further information on this in the coming weeks!