Understanding Wellbeing as an Enabler of Business Success with Sharon O’Connor
Today on The Work Well Podcast, we welcome Sharon O’Connor, Global Wellbeing Lead at Novartis. Sharon is an amazing example of an intentionally non-linear career path that has enabled her to work in different fields and industries, collecting insights on how wellbeing strategies work within each of these fields.
Sharon has worked in communications in the US, she was the Campaign Director for the 20x20 campaign, a movement promoting women and girls in sport, and she was in the first cohort of graduates from the Postgraduate Certificate in Workplace Wellness at Tangent, Trinity College Dublin.
Besides her job as wellbeing lead, Sharon is also a certificated yoga instructor, which compliments her interest in exercise and wellbeing in her personal and professional life.
The 20x20 Campaign Experience
We start this episode by talking about Sharon’s experience on the 20x20 Campaign, which aimed to support women and girls to participate in sport in Ireland. This was a huge success as we have seen the increase in press coverage of female sports teams and we also witnessed many more girls and women taking an interest in such a fundamental part of our daily life, physical activity.
This campaign reminds us of the #LikeaGirl Campaign launched by Always a couple of years ago and its impact on the population regarding unconscious bias and the perception of women in sport. You can watch the commercial here
The Energize for Life Initiative
Sharon joined Novartis, a renowned global pharmaceutical company, in November 2020 as Global Lead for Wellbeing. She became part of the Energize for Life team within Novartis and her job is to contribute to the company's effort to promote wellbeing strategies to employees through education and training that people can engage with from home.
Sharon works with nine international ambassadors in the Novartis network to support employees by creating and implementing wellbeing strategies. Their goal is to reimagine the way people interact and work to create programmes that holistically address wellbeing, taking care of people's mental, social, and physical health.
One of the key aims of these campaigns is to create relationships between co-workers and build a space where creativity and wellbeing are a priority. Sharon shares an example in the last campaign they ran focused on creativity.
How does a global organisation implement wellbeing strategies
Integrating strategies and practices into the culture is one of the ways Novartis ensures wellbeing in an international team. Sharon and her team take an experimental approach since each community is different and has different needs. It’s all about local customisation.
To find how the groups respond to these initiatives, the team runs surveys and uses other sources within the organisation to gather data that would be useful to customise a solution to each local team and align those objectives with the company’s goals.
How does Novartis help remote workers?
As Global Wellbeing Lead, Sharon is the first to understand that the home office generates a whole new dynamic to which workers must get used to. Novartis acknowledges this and strengthens its culture of learning by offering its employees e-learning programs to provide them with tools to best manage their time and avoid online fatigue while working from home.
What will the future of work look like?
Sharon believes her non-linear pathway provided her with many different points of view on how the world of work is going to adapt, depending on the industry. What we can expect, from a logistics perspective, is a hybrid approach to work that combines remote and in-office models.
From a holistic perspective, it’s a learning process for the company to offer alternatives to help the industry move forward, as we start to see wellbeing as a business enabler to maximise results.
Advice on building a wellbeing programme for a small or large company
Finally, Sharon shares some advice to help small-business owners and organisations implement sustainable wellbeing programmes. The first thing to do is match your strategy with the culture of your organisation.
Secondly, identify advocates of your strategy to start conversations, to feedback, clarify any doubt, and get a better idea of what the real needs are. Involve them as participants of the strategy.
These two points are extremely important as authenticity is a major factor in creating a successful wellbeing strategy.
Listen to the entire podcast above or search for ‘The Work Well Podcast’ on your preferred podcast platform (including Spotify), and you can watch the video of our conversation through this link.
About Your Host
Brian Crooke is a wellbeing educator, speaker and adviser, empowering Irish organisations to promote and sustain wellbeing within their workplaces.
He is the founder of The Work Well Institute and the Workplace Wellbeing Ireland community and is Course Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Workplace Wellness at Tangent, Trinity College Dublin. He is the host of The Work Well Podcast.
If you want to bring sustainable wellbeing to your workplace then check out The Work Well Institute’s flagship programme, Developing a Workplace Wellness Programme that Lasts.
In his spare time, Brian is bringing free resistance training to every county and community in Ireland through his parkHIIT social enterprise.
If you have any suggestions for future topics you'd like to hear on the show, email Brian directly, brian@workwellpodcast.com
Competition Time
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