Develop and Implement Personal Health and Wellbeing Strategy

A health and wellbeing strategy is a plan of how you can improve your health and wellbeing. It includes your objectives and the activities you will be implementing in order to achieve them. When developing your health and wellbeing strategy, you can refer to the following steps to guide you.

Step 1: Identify the issues

Based on the risk assessment you conducted, identify which hazards and stressors are the most prominent. How do these affect your physical health and mental wellbeing? If you have identified that you severely lack sleep, think of all the ways this affects other aspects of your life.

You may also approach this by working backwards, which can be helpful if you do not know the exact issues that are present. Think of what you feel, physically or emotionally, and list the possible causes. For example, you may have been feeling sadder lately, but you do not know the specific reason why. You can list the events that occurred and the activities you started or stopped doing recently and try to see if the cause can be traced back to them.

Step 2: Identify your objectives

Consider the issues you have identified and what about them you want to solve or improve. Think of your desired outcome and try to make it as specific and concrete as possible. If you have been feeling lonely lately, perhaps your objective could be to spend more time with your family. Or if your issue is that you have difficulty walking upstairs without feeling tired immediately, you may want to increase your stamina enough so that you can use the stairs without breaking a sweat.

Step 3: Identify required and available resources

Identify what resources you would need in order to achieve your desired outcome. If you want to start eating more nutritious food, think of the specific food that you would like to include in your diet and if this requires additional funds to go towards your budget for grocery shopping. Note that resources also include time. You would need to set aside time to be able to do the activities you want to do.

Next, identify what resources you already have access to. As discussed before, these resources can be available in your workplace and in your personal life. They may also come in different forms, such as areas, equipment, break times, programs, applications (apps) organisations and even people. Consider the ways you can utilise these resources in order to achieve the objectives you set.

Step 4: Develop key performance indicators

To check if you achieve your desired outcome, you need to develop key performance indicators (KPI). KPIs are how you measure your performance and see how close you are to your objective. Make sure that the KPIs you create are based on the following SMART goals.

• SPECIFIC: the objective should be clear and specific
• MEASURABLE: there should be a way to measure the goal objectively
• ACHIEVABLE: the goal should be realistic and attainable
• RELEVANT: the goal should be in line with your overall and long-term goals
• TIME BOUND: there should be a timeframe set for achieving the goal.

KPIs should be used to track your activities, such as the number of hours you spend exercising or the number of meals you cook instead of eating at restaurants. If you want to be more physically active, a sample KPI you can develop based on the SMART goals is to take a walk outside for 30 minutes every day for three months. Or if you want to find more purposeful activities, your KPI could be to volunteer at a local animal shelter for two hours once a week. 

You should also remember not to rely on solely numerical KPIs too much. For example, you may have achieved your goal of cooking more meals instead of eating out, but not all of those meals may have been healthy. Make sure that you give yourself specific and concrete guidelines to follow as well, such as defining what a ‘healthy meal’ is in terms of ingredients or calories.

Step 5: Plan the activities

Next, you can plan the specific activities you can do to achieve your desired outcome. As much as possible, try to plan these activities around the resources that are already available to you. For example, if you want to be more physically active and strengthen social connections, inviting friends and family to go for walks together is a great way to achieve both at the same time.

You can also do further research about the activities you want to do. If your goal is to build more muscle in a certain area of your body, you can look up exercises that target those areas and the intervals at which you should do them. You can also consult with medical professionals or anyone in a field relevant to your planned activities if you need specific advice about what to do.

If the activities you plan to do will take place during work or if you need to adjust your work schedule, refer to your organisation’s policies and procedures to see if and how you can do this.

Step 6: Determine how to track the activities

To measure your KPIs and track your progress, logs such as a physical activity plan, a logbook diet plan and sleep diary, are all great ways to record your physical health activities. You can also use additional tools like a scale or a pedometer to track more specific details such as weight and distance walked.

Meanwhile, you can record your mental wellbeing progress by using a mood tracker or a journal. Using a mood tracker is a quick and easy way to see patterns in your emotional states over time, but taking the time to write what happened during your day in a journal can help you understand why you feel those emotions. 

Over the course of implementing your strategy, you can check these logs to see how effective your activities are.

The following video is a light-hearted look at six (6) simple ways to improve your health and wellbeing at work. You may already be doing these!

Knowledge Check

Once you have planned your health and wellbeing strategy, you should inform the relevant people and ask for their feedback. You can check organisational policies and procedures for who to notify and for more specific instructions. Usually, the people you should inform are whoever you directly report to and are in charge of supervising you. This usually means your manager and other relevant higher-ups. You can schedule a formal meeting with them if they and organisational policies require it, but you can also start an informal conversation about it. It is important to ensure you are in a trusting relationship with your manager.

Talking about concerns and challenges you are having can be difficult, but management can provide you with the support that you need. When you present the activities that you plan to do, they can offer you suggestions to improve and refer you to resources that you need.

Consulting with them is also important if you need certain accommodations at work. For example, if you work in an office, the chair you use may be uncomfortable and causes health issues. Bringing this concern up with the relevant personnel allows you to discuss potential solutions with them, like providing you with an ergonomic chair. You can also ask them if it is possible to make changes to your work schedule. If you feel fatigued due to the number of hours you work and need to get more sleep, they may allow you to change your shift to implement your strategy.

As a manager, you need to demonstrate that you are willing and able to listen to your staff should they come to you with an issue. Staff should feel comfortable enough to confide in you without feeling judged on the issue whether this is personal or professional. You will need to ensure you maintain a high level of professionalism, including confidentiality. Breaking the trust of an employee is both unprofessional and unethical and in some cases, against company policy and legislation.

Outside the workplace, it may also help to inform others about your strategy. These may include your family, friends, partner, doctor and therapist. Your healthcare providers can give you professional advice on how to implement your strategy, while your friends and family can support you and even become involved in your activities.

Once you have planned out the activities for your health and wellbeing strategy, you should schedule when you will do them. To do this, you need to hone your time management skills. Time management refers to using your time in a productive and efficient way.

The following list provides time management tools that may help you schedule your activities.

• To-do list: A to-do list organises tasks that you aim to accomplish. It prioritises tasks according to importance. This helps you know which tasks you need to finish first before finally having time to do activities for your health and wellbeing strategy.
• Calendar: A calendar tracks, plans and schedules your tasks and projects. It allows you to allot time or days for personal health and wellbeing activities such as exercising, going out with friends or doing hobbies.
• Address book: An address book organises numbers, emails and addresses. It can save you time from searching and identifying who to call and who is calling. This helps you easily know who to call whenever you want to do personal health and wellbeing activities with other people. You could also keep the contact details of your healthcare providers and therapists in case you need to consult with them urgently.
• Physical/virtual notebook: A notebook keeps all information organised in one place. It makes the retrieval of information easier. You can use this to keep all the personal health and wellbeing activities you do, so if you want to do new activities, you can just refer to your notebook. Keeping all your activity trackers and logs in one place can be helpful if you have a lot of activities and find it difficult to manage multiple tools.

Priority matrix

While the to-do list contains all your tasks, you prioritise them by using the priority matrix, also known as the Eisenhower Matrix. This is a tool that helps you prioritise your tasks using a 2x2 matrix. Here, you will categorise your tasks according to the following:

• Do: These are tasks you must do immediately. These are usually difficult tasks with deadlines.
• Schedule: These are tasks that need to be accomplished but can be done later. These are usually the ones without set deadlines.
• Delegate: These are usually the easier tasks that have deadlines. You can ask someone else to do them or schedule to do them later.
• Do not do: These are tasks you can eliminate from your schedule. These are usually the distractions or things that make you procrastinate.

Imagine that the activity you plan to do is hiking with your friends. Having a to-do list lets you know if you have any other tasks that need to be done before you can go on the hike, and the calendar allows you to find the most suitable day to do it. You already have a few friends in mind who you want to invite, so you can go through your address book to find their contact details. When you contact them, you can revise your calendar if the original day you chose does not fit with their schedule. After your hike, you can use the notebook to write the distance you walked or how you felt during the experience.

Knowledge Check

Read the scenario and answer the question that follows.

Of course, in order to use any time management tools effectively, you need to know how to manage your time. The following are some time management techniques that you can use:

Prioritise important tasks to identify when you can do less important ones

You must prioritise which tasks must be accomplished first for the day or week. This allows you to know the available time and day when you can do activities for your personal health and wellbeing strategy. Your to-do list and priority matrix can help you prioritise your tasks.

Keep a time log of all activities

Tracking your daily activities gives you an idea of how much time it takes for you to do specific activities according to your energy levels and focus. This allows you to do your tasks during the time of the day where you are most productive. You can then spend the remaining time doing activities for your health and wellbeing strategy so that it does not affect your productive time. For example, if you feel groggy in the morning and energised during the afternoon, you can schedule your mindfulness exercises in the morning and do chores later in the day. You can use your calendar to keep track of the time you spend on each task.

Set boundaries on work-related tasks

A person who is constantly pushing themselves and saying yes to every task must set boundaries to not burn themselves out. You must effectively plan your time between work and personal life to keep yourself healthy and happy. Setting boundaries allows you to know when it is time for work and when it is time for health and wellbeing activities.

Setting boundaries is difficult to do, as it relies on you knowing how to refuse unreasonable demands. If you have prioritised your tasks and know how much time you need to do them, you may not be able to include additional tasks into your schedule. This is especially taxing on your health and wellbeing if your work tasks carry over outside the workplace and into your personal life.

If you are faced with more tasks, and you are not sure if you can make room in your schedule, communicate this clearly with the other person. Explain why you cannot take on the additional task in a calm, but assertive, manner. If this is a task that only you can do, offer to do it at a later time.

Although being productive is important, do not worry about having to maximise it all the time. You still need to schedule some time to take care of yourself. This applies to your health and wellbeing strategy, too, not just with work. Even if you miss a day of exercise or your hobby, do not be too hard on yourself. Your health and wellbeing strategy should help you become healthier and happier, not burn you out.

Key points

• When creating your health and wellbeing strategy, consider what aspect you want to focus on, what issues are present, the outcome you desire and what you can do to achieve it.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) for your health and wellbeing strategy must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.
• Informing relevant personnel in your workplace and people in your personal about your health and wellbeing strategy can give them the opportunity to support you.
• Time management tools include to-do lists, priority matrixes, calendars, address books and notebooks.
• Time management techniques include prioritising tasks, keeping a time log and setting boundaries.

The final activity for this topic is a set of questions that will help you prepare for your formal assessment.

Knowledge Check

Work through the following five (5) activities. Click the arrows to navigate between the tasks.