The Philosophy behind Well-being

Well-being is a free quarterly e-newsletter edited by Professor Neil Thompson, Director of Avenue Consulting Ltd and Director of the Institute for Applied Social Sciences, Liverpool Hope University.

Well-being addresses issues relating to both social well-being (matters of human concern in communities and in society at large) and workplace well-being (matters of human concern in the world of work).

It offers short articles, news items and reviews that will be of interest to members of the people professions (that is, the helping professions, human resource management and management and leadership more broadly) It has grown out of the work of Avenue Consulting Ltd, a company established in 2000 that offers training and consultancy relating to both social and occupational well-being issues. The company received so many requests for information and guidance on workplace concerns that a decision was made to set up a website specifically designed to provide such information. The company therefore established the Human Solutions website. This has proved to be a big success and attracts a great deal of interest.

However, this did not stop people wanting more and more information about these important concerns. Consequently, the Well-being quarterly e-newsletter was established, with the first issue being published in December 2006. This has proven to be a very successful venture, with thousands of people subscribing and extremely positive feedback all round. More people are signing up all the time. So, if you are already a subscriber, let us know your ideas about how the newsletter could be developed, and if you’re not a subscriber, click the link on the right-hand menu to sign up and see what you are missing.

Why well-being?

The emergence of new trends generally owes a lot to ‘confluence‛—that is, where two or more forces or sets of issues come together to bring about change. In this case, there have been issues relating to social well-being that have been of significance that have run alongside changes in the workplace relating to well-being. Let‛s consider each of these in turn

Social well-being

We have seen in recent years the slow death of the traditional idea of the welfare state, as a result of an increasing emphasis on: (i) a stronger focus on individualism rather than collectivism; (ii) greater economic prosperity feeding the myth that we no longer need social welfare; and (iii) the mistaken belief that public services will be more efficient if they are privatised or at least modelled on private industry. Margaret Thatcher‛s philosophy was at the root of this and New Labour have not made any substantial change to the direction she launched us in. We now have a much more self-centred, consumerist society that has moved away from ideas of community, public service and, in effect, social well-being. The result has been massive demoralisation across the public services as a result of the increased bureaucracy and centralised control that have shifted the emphasis from people work to paperwork. The emphasis on social well-being is in large part an attempt to ‘rehumanise‛ our society and make it more people
oriented.

Workplace well-being

In some respects workplace well-being has been going in the opposite direction. Since the decline of trade unionism (another Thatcher factor), workplaces have become less focused on the needs of the workforce. More enlightened organisations have started to realise that a move in this direction is not
a wise one. They have begun to recognise that an organisation‛s most important resource is indeed its people—and that it is therefore unwise to neglect the human dimension of the workplace.

And where does this leave us?

So, when we combine a focus on social well-being with one on workplace well-being, what we get is a clear message that people are at the heart of society in general and the workplace in particular—and that a better understanding of human well-being is needed. And that‛s precisely what we are trying to
do with Well-being each quarter: attempting to play a part in developing a better understanding of the people dimension of the workplace and of society more broadly.

Making a contribution

If you would like to write an article for Well-being, please contact us to let us know what you have in mind (contact details are to be found on the back of each issue). Similarly, if you have any snippets of information for the newsletter, want to publicise a relevant conference, issue a call for papers or place an advertisement, we would be pleased to hear from you.

If you know of people who might be interested in Well-being, please feel free to forward the newsletter to them and invite them to take out a free subscription. Please note that subscribers’ contact details will not be passed on to other organisations.

Neil Thompson
Avenue Consulting Ltd and Liverpool Hope University

Promoting Social and Workplace Well-being

The Philosophy behind Well-being