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WellWise Workplace Wellbeing
71 Plays4 years ago
Our conversation covers:
- Bobbi’s experience creating a framework for student wellbeing via an innovative accommodation offer
- WellWise’s Research driven diagnostic system approach to workplace wellbeing
- their Employee engagement process to build a culture around wellbeing
- their network of specialists providing bespoke solutions covering everything from sleep quality, to office design and environmental health
- the growing importance of mental health support at work
- the subtle but important difference between wellness and wellbeing
- the opportunities in the UAE market for workplace wellness
GUEST / Bobbi Hartshorne
- https://www.bewellwise.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/bewellwise/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbihartshornewellbeing/
HOST / Matt Morley
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Wellbeing and Sustainability
00:00:12
Speaker
episode 28 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality today. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico Wellbeing Interiors and Biofit Health & Fitness.
Workplace Wellbeing Programs with Bobby Hartsworn
00:00:32
Speaker
Episode 28 takes us to Dubai, where we're talking to Bobby Hartsworn, co-founder and chief wellbeing officer at WellWise, a UK and UAE-based business that takes an integrated diagnostics approach to delivering value via workplace wellbeing programs for corporations large and small. Our conversation covers Bobby's experience creating a framework for student wellbeing via an innovative accommodation offer,
00:01:00
Speaker
WellWise's research-driven diagnostic system approach to workplace wellbeing, their employee engagement process to build a culture around wellbeing, their network of specialists providing bespoke solutions covering everything from sleep quality to office design and environmental health, the growing importance of mental health support at work,
00:01:21
Speaker
the subtle but important difference between wellness and wellbeing, and finally, the opportunities in the UAE market for workplace wellness. If you like this type of content, please hit subscribe. You can find my contact details in the show notes. Bobby is at bwellwise.com, as it sounds. Nada mas. Let's get into it. Bobby, let's
Student Accommodation and Wellbeing Challenges
00:01:45
Speaker
do this. If I may, I'm gonna start by going back in time a little bit, because something came out of your
00:01:51
Speaker
CV as I was doing my research for this conversation. And it's a, it's a sector that seems to be really going through a transformation at the moment. I know it's no longer what you do, but I did want to just pick your brains a little bit on the student accommodation space. And you had a role, a set of wellbeing for global student accommodation group. And really there you were targeting Generation Z as I see it. And it's a dynamic sector. So you're combining wellness with student accommodation. Like what did that
00:02:20
Speaker
give you, and how did that go on to influence where you are today running various workplace wellness businesses? Yeah. Well, it was a really interesting journey, Matt. The thing about that role at GSA was that I created it for myself. And so it was really the first of its kind in the private built student accommodation environment, although there had been similar roles in universities.
00:02:50
Speaker
And so it was a real very steep learning curve. And it was really in response to a growing concern about the wellbeing of students and the types of issues that were increasingly coming up in our residences, but also just around universities in general. And what I learned was that
00:03:14
Speaker
For students, well-being is relatively universal. There were kind of nine key areas that we were finding were the constant sources of stress or the opportunities to improve well-being and they were
00:03:29
Speaker
financial, cultural, physical, mental, academic, spiritual, career and environmental. And that really it was this extreme change and this transition that young people are going through when they go from school into university that really creates this instability where stress and low well-being and challenges can fester.
00:03:57
Speaker
And the degree to which an individual has the ability to cope with those, to address them, to reduce them varies massively depending on who they are, where they come from, what experiences they've had in the past. And so whilst we were able to build a framework for wellbeing that was fairly consistent across the world, how each individual student engaged with that or benefited from it
00:04:25
Speaker
really did vary and there was certainly no one size fits all. And then what happened was it dawned on me that these young people who were really quite different to the types of students that we'd had previously sort of the Millennials and the way they behaved and what they valued and what got them motivated and what stressed them
00:04:45
Speaker
was very different and it dawned on me that those young people were going to enter the workforce and that they were going to present some interesting and new challenges to employers in the same way that they had presented new and interesting challenges to the student accommodation sector.
Impact of COVID on Workplace Wellbeing
00:05:04
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And so I got
00:05:05
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really into looking at that transition again that vulnerable period of transition out of university and into the workplace and I started to look at how existing working practices were maybe not going to align particularly well with this new generation and maybe some of the challenges that were going to crop up and it wasn't long before we started to see
00:05:30
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burnout in mid 20 year olds who'd been in the workplace less than 10 years.
00:05:35
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It wasn't long before we started to see employers very concerned about mental health issues for younger employees and a real change in pattern in terms of what those young employees were seeking from their employers. And it was way beyond cash. It just was so much more than financial gain. And so this is really where my interest in the workplace began.
00:06:02
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And then COVID cropped around the corner, gave us all a bit of a fright. And that was really an interesting experience because putting a workplace under an exception, the extreme set of circumstances like COVID, and you tend to bring out either the best or the worst or a mixture of both. And so I really then started to observe what happens in a workplace under extreme circumstances and what happens to employees and leaders and managers.
00:06:30
Speaker
under extreme workplace environments. And so that really was what gave the sort of leeway for me to take the jump out of the student accommodation world and into the workplace world, because there were a lot of similarities and crossovers that I could draw on. But there was also a whole world of stuff I was interested in that I wanted to explore further.
00:06:52
Speaker
So, am I right in thinking then with the student accommodation you to use the terminology from from the hotel world of you're dealing with hardware and software. So you're dealing both with.
Integrating Wellbeing in Student Accommodation
00:07:05
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sort of training and teaching and the mental game as well as the physical game. So the actual spaces, I mean, it's accommodation. So the spaces in which these people were, the students were spending their times sleeping at night, but they also then providing, if you like, more operational solutions to, yeah, keeping them sane and healthy and positive and upbeat, right?
00:07:28
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Absolutely. And it's quite strange, actually, from the physical perspective, Matt, because universities for a really long time have been doing a lot to support students across all of those pillars that I mentioned earlier. But the one area that always seemed to be neglected or that was never really optimized was the accommodation, whether that was university owned accommodation or whether it was privately owned accommodation. And it struck me that the
00:07:56
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The nature of your home is the place where you're going to be engaging with your personal studies, where you're going to have your downtime, where you're going to be maybe alone in your room. The times when the challenges are probably going to rear their ugly heads and it was really important for us to make sure that our teams in the residences knew how to support students in that environment.
00:08:25
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But increasingly that as we were upgrading residences, as we were building new residences, how we laid those structures out, how we built community, how we identified whether students were isolated or behaving differently to maybe their normal patterns, that all became part of it. So yeah, absolutely operational and physical and training.
Authentic Wellbeing Solutions and Consultancy
00:08:49
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There seem to be just so many
00:08:50
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Parallels between the two and it without sort of trying to labor the point too much if you were to switch out What you've just described in the last couple of minutes, but instead of describing students we would describe staff or Employees and in fact in a lot of those same
00:09:06
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issues can come up or have been coming up, especially over the last few years around stress and anxiety and what have you. And so you then to then transition across into the next phase of your career, you move to launch your own business in October 2020 and surrender. And there you're focusing more, as I understand it, on sort of a consultancy role for workplace wellbeing. Is that right? Absolutely.
00:09:28
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It just felt like absolutely my natural transition and my passion had really gone into that space. Not that I wasn't still passionate about the student space, but I felt like I'd kind of done a huge amount in the student space and there were great people there who could carry that on and evolve it further and my passion had moved really into the workplace and
00:09:51
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how the parallels, as you've already alluded to, could transition across and really set up and surrender as a small independent workplace wellbeing consultancy. I could see in the same way as five years previously, I could see that the university sector was struggling with student wellbeing, the exact same was happening now with
00:10:13
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employees, employers struggling with employee well being. I was also observing a lot of snake oil solutions, and a lot of well washing, we call it and they're in your field, you have green washing. And this idea that it kind of wasn't very authentic that that a lot of the work and practice going on in this space was at a very surface level.
00:10:38
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plaster over the cracks, put a nice picture on your website and kind of say that you're doing well-being, but as time went on it became very apparent to organisations that that really wasn't enough and it wasn't getting to the heart of the actual challenges and unpacking those and really helping them to address the impact that a poor well-being workforce creates for an organisation and that was really
00:11:01
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where I wanted to step in with a much more rigorous and I guess scientific approach to well-being but I was really held back in doing that because what I didn't have that I really wanted was a really strong research platform. I kind of knew all the ingredients that were required through my own experience and through
00:11:25
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all the research I'd done, but I wasn't able to get those articulated in a meaningful way because I didn't have a research platform. And so really not wanting to be just another snake oil charmer or just another well washer, I set about trying to solve that riddle and that was really when Tim Dapplin and WellWise came into the picture.
Data-Driven Approach to Workplace Wellbeing
00:11:48
Speaker
I think it's a crucial point because as you've suggested, typically when going in on these projects, when there is a problem, it's like by the time you get to the mechanic, something's gone wrong with the car. So often by the time a consultant's brought in, you've got people complaining or the mood and the atmosphere in the office is really
00:12:10
Speaker
turn negative or whatever it might be, something's going wrong. I think it's quite rare that it sort of anticipates a potential need. Typically you're kind of coming a little bit late to the game. So you have to deliver on the data and the numbers and it's just, it's not enough to come and sort of paint some, as you say, some nice pictures and some nice words and hope everything works out. So you then took this sort of far more data driven and research driven approach with WellWise or where you're currently
00:12:40
Speaker
Clearly spending a lot of your time and energy and it looks to be an interesting new addition. So why don't we dig into that a little bit? So in terms of like what that brings to the market and the needs that it's addressing, like how are you resolving some of the issues that are out there at the moment?
00:12:55
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Yeah, so look, Tim, Tim, my business partner, Tim Dablin, he already had a really, really strong research platform that, funnily enough, he was using in the student space, which is how Tim and I know each other, but he was also using it in other industries as well. And so I knew that that platform and the strength of the tech involved in that platform was exactly what we were going to need to unpack the complexity of what we now call the workplace wellbeing network.
00:13:25
Speaker
So we set about understanding, building on our knowledge, understanding what currently employers were purchasing in this space, what issues were they trying to target, what solutions were already on the market, what research was already out there, what questions were being asked, and we started to spot some key
00:13:48
Speaker
patterns. And these kind of were split in two. They were either looking at what was happening with the employees themselves. So why are our employees not engaged? How do we build resilience? Why are our employees eating a terrible diet? Why are they not sleeping properly?
00:14:07
Speaker
or they would then look at organisational factors, although there was a lot less of that going on, but you would say, you know, is our management style appropriate for a modern workforce? Are our rewards and recognitions keeping up with the latest trends and desires of our employees? And so you had these kind of two sides of workplace wellbeing, but what you didn't really have was anybody who was working out how the two fit together
00:14:35
Speaker
how they impacted one another and where they could strengthen each other. And that was really what Tim and I were curious to see if we could create, and it turned out we could, so that was great. And in kind of talking to business leaders, what we discovered was three really important things. The first was that workplace wellbeing and employee wellbeing was top priority, or at least top five priority,
00:15:03
Speaker
for every single business leader we spoke to the second was that they were all completely overwhelmed by the amount of choice the amount of solutions the amount of conversation the diversity of the discussion and they were really struggling to navigate through to something that meant
00:15:22
Speaker
something to their own organization and their own situation and the third thing was that a lot of them had already started and maybe even four or five years in have been investing in solutions and approaches and building teams and building structures around this stuff but it wasn't actually really
00:15:41
Speaker
yielding what they kind of hoped and so there was this kind of disillusionment or this paralysis happening where they were struck with this problem they just could not solve and so after six months of research and diving into this topic we built a diagnostic system that brings those two factors together that organizational side and that employee side
00:16:02
Speaker
And what we're able to offer organizations now is really comes down to clarity, being able to understand exactly what's happening in your organization, where the pain points are being created, where the challenges are arising from.
00:16:17
Speaker
and what the causation and outcomes of those are, what the cost of those are is to your organization. And then to help them to navigate through a strategic blueprint to a much more successful place to redesign or redeploy their resources into the areas where it was going to have the most impact the quickest and then build from there to where they wanted to go.
00:16:45
Speaker
Okay. So you're, you're beginning that process with a data collection phase.
WISE Process for Workplace Wellbeing
00:16:51
Speaker
So presumably research and surveys, you then, so you're, you're getting both qualitative and quantitative data that gives you your baseline, right? And that forms part of your, of the process, your WIS process, as you call it, right? And then from there, where do you, where do you go on to? Well, actually there's actually a step before the data collection process, which we call the why.
00:17:13
Speaker
phase, W for Y. And really, this is this is often missing as well. We discovered when we're doing our research is that quite often companies don't actually understand why it is that they're investing or think that they should be investing in workplace well being. They they've either caught on to a trend, or they've spotted a specific issue such as engagement or resilience, or health.
00:17:41
Speaker
or they have a problem with something like productivity or engagement. And they go, oh, well, well-being must be the answer. So because everybody's telling us that's the answer. But actually, when you start to talk to different employees across an organization, particularly at the senior level, you discover that there's actually quite a big difference in what they understand well-being is going to bring to the table. And some of them have got it, unfortunately, quite wrong.
00:18:10
Speaker
And some of them have got it right, but it's not aligned to to their colleagues. And the other big why is why are you doing what you're already doing? So a lot of organisations have already invested in this space, have already bought in consultants, they've already built a framework, they're already doing activities. But why did they choose that approach in the first place? And then why isn't it working?
00:18:33
Speaker
So we have to understand all of that whineness before we can do the survey, because what the survey then allows us to do is to dig into those issues a bit further, as well as just cover off the workplace wellbeing network that I already alluded to with those two sides. And then once we've got those two factors, we can look at them together and say, well, you're saying you want to achieve X, but your current approach isn't doing that.
00:18:59
Speaker
your employees are still struggling with this factor because of this situation. And so what we're then able to do is move on to the S, the strategize element of the wise process and help them to use all of that insight, use that quantitative and qualitative insight and really drill down on a strategy that is going to help them achieve their why by unpacking
00:19:25
Speaker
the identified issues that we got at the eye stage. So that's what we do. And then after we've done that, we've got a lovely strategy on a piece of paper. Well, it's next to useless when it's only on a piece of paper. And it's now about engaging. It's the E phase of our WISE process. You have to start engaging people. And there's two sets of people you need to engage. The first one, of course, is your employees. So how are you going to build them up, get them on board?
00:19:53
Speaker
get them bought into the process, get them contributing to it and building a culture around wellbeing. And the second people you have to engage are professionals and specialists and that they could be sleep specialists or office design specialists or management and leadership specialists. There'll be a whole mixture of things. So that phase is really important as well. And it's really cool actually the way that that plays out, Matt, because
00:20:24
Speaker
Those professionals that we bring in and we've got a network of people we can rely on that's growing seemingly daily, they don't come into an unknown quantity. They come in at the point that we've already understood the why. We've already done all that quantitative data and analysis. So we're able to point them in the direction of the specific challenge that we're trying to target with their solution. So they're not trying to create a solution blind.
00:20:52
Speaker
They've got some real tangible insights themselves that make their impact much greater. And then once you've done all of that and you've started to embed some different solutions, you're of course going to want to know whether it's working and that's where we
00:21:06
Speaker
bringing our reevaluation, whether that's we rerun the whole system again, or whether we periodically, you know, look at a particular area on a smaller scale. And we can be quite agile with that now with technology and dashboards at our disposal to be able to dig in to a deeper or a shallower level, depending on the need of the organization at that time. Is that then again, based on, let's call it employee satisfaction? Because often it's this question from
00:21:35
Speaker
from sort of the CEO, CFO character saying, okay, great, we're gonna do all of this. And what are the bottom line results? What are we actually getting from all of this beyond some intangible sense of having a happier workforce? So when you're faced with that question, you're creating a lot of data at the front end, you're then delivering a strategy, and then at the back end, there's just sort of looping back in to generate some, if you like, proof of concept that it's working. Typically, what data points are you leveraging most there in that conversation?
Benefits of Wellbeing on Business Outcomes
00:22:05
Speaker
The thing that is so awesome about wellbeing is that it improves almost anything that a CEO cares about. So a high wellbeing workforce is more productive, they're more engaged, they're more satisfied, they're more innovative, they're more collaborative, they're more creative.
00:22:24
Speaker
they're far more likely to stay, so retention. They're also far more likely to recommend your workplaces somewhere for others to come in, so it helps with recruitment. You get better team cohesion, you get better team creativity, and essentially, it just elevates everything. If there's a
00:22:48
Speaker
specific thing that they're particularly targeting so let's say they've got really low engagement or really low productivity and we can certainly engineer the strategy initially to specifically seek to drive improvements there.
00:23:04
Speaker
But what you find with wellbeing or improved wellbeing in general is that as it elevates, it just pulls everything up. It's really quite fascinating in that regard. And the other thing that often is overlooked is as a result of all of this, it drives the bottom line. So we know that organisations with high workplace wellbeing have 2% to 3%
00:23:32
Speaker
better performance on the stock market. We know that they have better customer loyalty. We know that they have better sales performance. So it really does, you know, I'm really not trying to over egg the pudding here, but when you have a high wellbeing workforce, everything else tends to fall into place. And so that's why we really discourage people from focusing on just something like resilience or just engagement or just productivity.
00:23:59
Speaker
and rather look at wellbeing because your dividends, your return for an investment in wellbeing will be so much greater and so much broader than if you just try and pinpoint one specific problem and neglect the other elements of wellbeing. So yeah, lots of things. Okay. And so if we then dig a little bit deeper into the wellness practitioners.
Roles and Practitioners in Workplace Wellbeing
00:24:22
Speaker
So in terms of the employee experience, apart from contributing to
00:24:28
Speaker
creating some initial baseline data around how things are performing in the office at the moment. In terms of the lived experience, what they're engaging with are these practitioners who come in and perhaps you could just a hypothetical example or a real-life case study of perhaps that mix of two, three, four practitioners that you might bring in that would have an immediate impact on the employee experience or whether it's sort of
00:24:52
Speaker
If it's a fitness or wellness classes or the environment that they're working in, because that at the end of the day is the process in action, isn't it? It's the staff saying, oh, well, look, here it is. The changes are coming and whether that works or not and whether you need to tweak it a little bit. So typically, how do you see that playing out? Yeah, it's going to be really interesting.
00:25:12
Speaker
on a case-by-case basis as to which practitioner or which approach you choose to invest in and in what order you choose to take them on. Actually, aside from practitioners, I'll come back to that in a moment, but actually there's a huge amount that you can just do internally. You don't always need
00:25:34
Speaker
external help with this, sometimes the results and the strategy is about actually assessing what's happening internally and
00:25:44
Speaker
and working out challenges that you've got internally that you can actually fix yourself. So it's not always about saying right over to a handful of people who are going to rescue your business because a lot of the answers exist internally and you've already got talent who can do that. But where there is gaps in your experience or your knowledge or their specialist areas that your organization is not familiar with,
00:26:09
Speaker
It could be a real mixture of things. We're seeing a huge rise, for instance, in sleep practitioners as we increasingly understand the power of good sleep and the cost of bad sleep on everything that is human about us. We're seeing as a result of COVID and this big conversation around hybrid working and trying to attract people back to the office. What even is an office now? This question has just come up in the last six months where
00:26:38
Speaker
what we've always considered to be an office, the purpose of an office, what an office should do, has just been blown out of the water. And in order to attract people back to these places that we call offices, we're having to get very creative about what they look like, how they service, what function they fulfill, how they enable success. So you're going to definitely have a big push in terms of office design,
00:27:04
Speaker
and environmental factors that help to drive those things. I think you're going to definitely see a rise in the need for mental health support, compensation and benefits design is going to change because cash is no longer king, as I already alluded to. And then probably on the less traditional side, I think you're going to start to see a rise in wellbeing scientists like myself, who can help people to unpack that data.
00:27:32
Speaker
you're going to have people who can assess your strategy as an organization and how wellbeing can help you to achieve that. I think we're probably going to see a lot more team practitioners as the role of teams, especially with a hybrid slash remote working changes and challenges that are coming in. And also one of the big areas that I suspect was going to be leadership and management training.
00:27:58
Speaker
We're moving from hero leadership to servant leadership and that is a massive shift in how you act, how you think, what you do, the decisions you make, the way that you lead.
00:28:14
Speaker
And that's a real big area of development that that also and sustainable leadership, which I don't mean sustainable in terms of environmental sustainability, although, of course, that is very important. I mean, sustaining yourself as a leader, as the world of leadership just becomes so increasingly high pressured. How do you maintain your best leadership capabilities by by having high well being yourself? And how do you then
00:28:43
Speaker
invoke that sense of it's good to have a high well being workforce and sort of that gets moved down the organization. So yeah, so I think there's going to be some interesting developments in in that space. And then finally, I think it's probably going to be a shift in HR practices, performance management, or rather, it should be performance optimization, and the employee branding, recruitment strategies and the design of the employee experience, they're all going to be
00:29:13
Speaker
things that I think are going to grow in terms of practitioner needs.
Wellbeing vs. Wellness in Workplace Strategies
00:29:18
Speaker
You've been using the term well-being throughout this conversation and I think it's, I read something on your site recently where you tried to pick apart the two concepts of wellness and wellbeing. It can seem, not irrelevant, but it can seem that the two terms almost just merge into one. But I was interested to hear your thoughts on how you consider wellbeing
00:29:40
Speaker
to be perhaps more of a 360 view of being physically and mentally in a good place versus wellness that was perhaps more limited. Is that a fair assumption?
00:29:51
Speaker
Yeah I think I mean it's really hard now because as you said well-being and wellness are sometimes just used interchangeably but actually they do have slightly different definitions and they definitely have different histories and for me wellness generally refers to sort of an individual person's physical and to a degree mental well-being whereas
00:30:15
Speaker
wellbeing has a broader and deeper meaning which incorporates things like life satisfaction, accomplishment, motivation, purpose, engagement. I think wellbeing is something that's more easily applied to groups, which when we think about the workplace is important in terms of the wellbeing dynamics of teams, the wellbeing dynamics of departments, of offices, of regions, etc. So
00:30:41
Speaker
you know, there's that kind of dual individual versus group application of wellbeing that's harder to express in wellness terms. I mean, the International Labour Organization describes workplace wellbeing as related to all aspects of working life, from the quality and safety of the physical environment, to how workers feel about their work, their working environment, the climate at work and work organisation. And why does it matter? Well, because
00:31:10
Speaker
The lens with which you understand wellbeing or wellness, it really doesn't matter what you call it, but the lens by which you understand it is going to massively influence your strategic approach to it, the types of practitioners you engage, the types of consultants you engage, the data that you're looking for. If it's understood in the more limited historic realms of wellness,
00:31:38
Speaker
there is a risk that you will miss out on the opportunities to explore it through that much deeper lens of what we call wellbeing. And typically we see wellbeing referred to in the science and the data as opposed to wellness.
00:31:56
Speaker
I kind of tend to feel that it's a slightly more rigorous subject. Well-being is a more rigorous subject than wellness. Yeah, I get it. I like that.
Global Perspectives on Workplace Wellbeing
00:32:05
Speaker
And we haven't touched on your location, but you're obviously straddling two countries in a sense between the UK and Dubai, the UAE. Now, how do you see those two
00:32:18
Speaker
locations differing in terms of interpretations of workplace wellbeing? Are you seeing certain things that have much more relevance or importance in the UAE versus in the UK, for example, or vice versa? Do you know what? In many ways, it's not as different as you might expect. And there's some strengths and benefits to both that have sort of come out actually in the last four or five months that I've observed. The thing we have to understand is that wellbeing is universal.
00:32:49
Speaker
How we approach it, how we solve it, how we understand it, how we address it, the degree to which we're open to do that varies from culture to culture. But the actual ingredients or factors that contribute to a human's wellbeing are the same, the world over.
00:33:07
Speaker
And you know, as cities and any major city anywhere in the world that has a diverse cultural population is going to have issues and challenges and opportunities because of that variance.
00:33:25
Speaker
My gut feeling is that a lot of the issues are prevailing the world over, they're not unique to particular cultures. So again, coming back to this shift from hero leadership to servant leadership, that is happening in the West as much as it's happening here. Race and gender inequalities that are still prevailing the world over, old habits dying hard in kind of very highly bureaucratic, very highly hierarchical
00:33:52
Speaker
issues. These exist here as much as they exist in the West. For me, I think the only major hurdle is that there is probably
00:34:01
Speaker
a slightly delayed discourse here and that maybe the conversation hasn't been as open for as long in the Middle East, in the Gulf region as it has been in the West, so people's kind of openness or understanding or literacy around the topic is maybe slightly lower here. But in some ways that actually, Matt, presents an opportunity for this region because
00:34:28
Speaker
Because the wellbeing conversation and the understanding of wellbeing has matured so quickly and our data and our best practice evolution has been so fast, actually, I find that sometimes the West is carrying a bit of old baggage in this space and a little bit of like, well, we've been on this journey for five years now and nothing's changed or little has changed. And so there's a frustration there, whereas
00:34:54
Speaker
The Gulf region is joining the conversation at a much more advanced stage and a much deeper understanding of the science behind it.
00:35:05
Speaker
they don't have to shed their baggage before they can engage at this higher level, which in many ways could present a really, really cool opportunity for them to leapfrog some of the resistance that we maybe are seeing in the West. And actually, that has definitely played out. I have had more traction and interest and engagement from organizations in this region, including Saudi and the UAE, than I have yet had in the UK.
00:35:35
Speaker
where you would expect the conversation to be much more mature. Nice. Well, it sounds like you could be in the right place at the right time. So that was great. Really insightful conversation. So thank you so much for your time. How can people reach out and contact you? Where can they find you online?
Connecting with WellWise for Resources
00:35:52
Speaker
Yeah, so the best place to contact us is www.bwellwise.com. We've got some really great free resources for people there. We've got a free to download white paper which explores current challenges with wellbeing and how to improve them. We've got a online self-assessment tool where people can go in and
00:36:14
Speaker
answer a handful of questions and then get some tailored advice into their emails. And we've got a whole host of blogs and ebooks and things that are exploring a lot of the themes we've talked about today. So that's a great starting point. And there's obviously contact us opportunities there. And then follow us on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where most of our sort of thought leadership is taking place. So that's a really cool place to follow us, which is again, be well wise at LinkedIn.
00:36:41
Speaker
So yeah, that would be where to find us. All right. Listen, thanks so much for your time. It's been fun. Pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me, Matt.