Workplace Wellbeing
Workplace Wellbeing: A Relational Approach began with a simple proposition: work is relationships.
Much of conventional workplace wellbeing focuses on the individual — resilience, stress management and strategies for coping. Such approaches can carry an implicit assumption that it is the individual who has somehow failed: to cope, to adapt, or to be sufficiently resilient.
This book moves further upstream to ask a different question: what is it about the relationships, groups and organisations in which we work that enables us to flourish — or prevents us from doing so?
Drawing on psychotherapy, organisational life and my experience of working with people across public, private and third-sector organisations, the book develops a relational approach to working life. It explores trust, power, attachment, conflict, groups, relational abuse, change, grief and the difficult business of remaining human at work.
The ambition is larger than helping people survive unhealthy workplaces. It is to ask what it would take to create working relationships in which people can genuinely flourish.
Impact
Workplace Wellbeing has travelled beyond the book itself. Its relational approach has informed leadership development, organisational consultancy and reflective practice, including work with practitioners supporting major UK public inquiries.
The book has also begun to find a place in scholarship beyond workplace wellbeing, with its relational framework taken up in work on organisational communication, leadership, employee wellbeing, education, and the quality of working life in health and social care.
In practice
Leadership
Used in postgraduate study in educational management and subsequently recommended to colleagues as a resource for thinking about relational approaches to organisational culture and wellbeing.
Public inquiries
The relational approach developed through the book has informed my work facilitating reflective spaces for psychological practitioners working with the UK Home Office Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and, subsequently, the UK Cabinet Office COVID-19 Inquiry.
Scholarship
Workplace Wellbeing continues to travel beyond its original context. Its relational account of work has been drawn on in subsequent research into workplace wellbeing, including research in education in the United States, policing in Australia and long-term care in Italy.
In education, the book has been used to frame relationships, belonging, care and compassion as dimensions of workplace stress. In policing, it has contributed to a social-constructionist framework examining wellbeing and resilience. In Italian long-term care research, it has been drawn on in developing an EU-funded framework for understanding relational wellbeing and quality of working life.
Reviews & responses
“A clear-sighted and challenging book … a must for anyone interested in workplace wellbeing.”
Therapy Today, February 2021
In conversation
A feature discussing Workplace Wellbeing and its challenge to conventional approaches to wellbeing at work.
Gaslighting and other ways we’re abused at work
You Are Not a Frog, Episode 86
A conversation with Dr Rachel Morris about workplace relationships, gaslighting and relational abuse.
Side Hustles: How to Earn More Money?
ITV Tonight, June 2022
Interviewed for ITV Tonight (June 2022) about work, relationships and the place of meaningful work in a flourishing life.
Related writing
Find the book
Workplace Wellbeing: A Relational Approach
James Costello
Routledge, 2020