In an organisation that I have been working with recently, we have been paying attention to wellbeing – and creating a ‘wellbeing plan’.

Clearly an important aim, even if the term wellbeing is beginning to feel overused and at risk of inducing cynicism in those who are hoped to be the recipients of the well-intentioned plan.

In our organisation, like many others, perhaps the most critical steps is to work out what the term wellbeing relates to exactly. How do we define it? Is it the same thing for every individual? Is there a difference between individual wellbeing and that of the team, or whole organisation? Certainly, anything that is hard to define will be difficult to measure and thus judge the effect of any actions.

It can feel as though estimating wellbeing in organisations is a little similar to judging happiness – a notoriously tricky entity to define. But is wellbeing the same as happiness? And what is happiness?

The essence of happiness has been discussed for thousands of years, since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle defined happiness as eudaimonia – a state of flourishing through living virtuously with meaning and purpose. In more recent times we also consider ‘hedonic happiness’ or the state that comes from pleasurable experiences and sensations while avoiding unpleasant ones.

However, despite the work of thinkers over many centuries we still don’t have an agreed-upon definition of happiness, one of the most important things in life. The modern entity of Positive Psychology, the scientific study of wellbeing, also struggles a little with this concept and instead substitutes the term ‘subjective wellbeing’ (wellbeing – there it is again!) as an alternative for happiness. A person’s level of SWB relates to how often one feels positive emotions and moods, how infrequently one experiences negative states, and a general sense of life satisfaction.

Again, SWB applies to individuals. Can it be extrapolated to organisations?

Returning to modern day organisations – where we universally want to increase wellbeing – we also struggle with the definition and measurement of wellbeing in our people as well as at a broader organisational level. Many staff surveys essentially attempt to assess some measures of SWB and then use this as a measure of the whole organisation and indicate where action needs to occur. Is organisational wellbeing simply a total of all the individual SWB measures divided by the staff number? Does the wellbeing of some in the organisation matter more than others and contribute more to the total score? Are leaders weighted differently to new signings?

Going back to the original question of how to produce a wellbeing plan that helps the organisation as well as those working within, what should we do? Can we use measured levels of SWB across all staff as a de facto measure of organisational wellbeing? Would this equate to that equally slippery concept of organisational culture? I think not, because organisational culture is an even broader concept that includes multiple other factors such as performance and ways of undertaking tasks.

Perhaps the answer is that individual wellbeing amongst all staff is not only a critical contributor to their health and the way each person experiences their life – it is also an important foundation of organisational culture. Of course, not all things can be fixed overnight and as a complex entity our organisational culture will develop in emergent unexpected ways. The efforts that the team make to improve individual wellbeing practices and work conditions may create ripples that help others even when not able to be measured.

In the end, the care that we give to ourselves and others, how we interact and communicate, will help wellbeing and aid in creation of a generative and successful organisational culture