Corporate Wellbeing Workshops for UK Teams

Why So Much of This Spending Does Nothing

The uncomfortable finding first. A 2024 study by William Fleming at the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre looked at 46,336 workers across 233 UK organisations and compared people who took part in individual-level wellbeing programmes, things like resilience training, mindfulness sessions, wellbeing apps and coaching, with people who did not. On multiple measures of wellbeing, participants appeared no better off. Volunteering was the single exception.

What that study does not say is that every workshop is worthless. It is cross-sectional, built on data gathered in 2017 and 2018, it groups quite different interventions together, and it measures association rather than cause. Other researchers have said so. But the direction of it is hard to argue with, and Fleming's own summary is the sentence I would want any buyer to read before booking me: organisations have to change the workplace, not just the worker.

So here is the honest version. If your absence figures are climbing because people are carrying two jobs each, a resilience workshop is the wrong purchase. It will be well received, people will say nice things on the feedback form, and nothing will change, because nothing about the job changed. Fix the workload, the rota or the manager first. I would rather tell you that on a phone call than take the booking.

Where a workshop does earn its place is narrower and more specific. Giving managers language for a conversation they are currently avoiding. Naming what pressure does to a team's judgement before a deadline rather than after it. Making it ordinary to say something is wrong, in a business where that has quietly become unsayable.

What I Actually Deliver

Sessions are built around what your team is dealing with rather than pulled off a shelf, so the list below is a starting point for a conversation, not a menu.

For everyone. Workplace wellbeing, managing pressure, resilience, confidence, communication.

For managers and leaders. Leadership, teamwork, motivation, performance, and the specific problem of spotting that someone is struggling early enough to matter.

For individuals inside the organisation. Personal development work, one to one, where that is what is actually needed. That sits closer to my personal development coaching and business and team coaching than to a workshop.

On site at your premises, or online where the team is spread out. Half a day is the most common shape. Longer programmes run across several sessions, because one morning does not change a culture and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Mental Health Training for Managers

This is the request I get most often, and it usually arrives after something has already gone wrong. Somebody went off sick and nobody saw it coming. Or a manager handled a difficult conversation badly and now nobody wants them handling the next one.

What I am not doing is turning your managers into counsellors. That is the mistake most of this training makes. A manager who believes they are now responsible for somebody's mental health will either avoid the conversation altogether or wade into something they cannot hold, and both of those are worse than doing nothing.

What I teach is narrower and more useful. How to notice the change in somebody before it becomes a crisis, which is almost never the thing people expect it to be. How to open the conversation without it turning into an interrogation or a performance review. What to say when somebody tells you something serious and you were not ready for it. When to stop talking and refer, and who to refer to. And how to do all of that without carrying it home, because the manager's own wellbeing is the part everybody forgets about until they lose the manager too.

I teach it from both chairs. I spent more than twenty years managing people before I retrained, so I have been the manager who was not sure what to say. I hear the other half now, from clients whose managers got it right and clients whose managers got it badly wrong. What separates those two is almost never a policy. It is whether one person said the right sentence at the right moment.

Half a day suits most teams, or it can be built into a longer programme where you want it to hold. On site or online.

Why a Therapist Rather Than a Training Provider

Two reasons, and they are both about the room rather than the slides.

The first is that I spent more than twenty years in corporate leadership before I retrained, so I have sat on the other side of this. I know what a wellbeing initiative looks like when it is genuinely meant, and what it looks like when it is cover. I also spent over fifteen years as an international sports coach, working with teams and individuals competing at European and World Championship level, which is where I learned that pressure is a skill problem rather than a character problem.

The second is that I have been in practice as a counsellor and psychotherapist since 2013, and I still see clients every week. That matters when somebody stays behind at the end of a session to ask you something they have not asked anyone. A trainer has to refer that on. I can tell you honestly what I think is going on and where to go with it.

What I am not is a scaled provider. There is no 24-hour helpline behind me, no app, and no capacity to cover multiple sites at once. If your organisation needs those things, an EAP is the right instrument and I will say so.

Where This Works Best

Smaller organisations, where the person signing this off is the owner or the one HR generalist, and where a named human who keeps turning up is worth more than a national contract.

Milton Keynes and the surrounding area for on-site work, which covers Wolverton, Stony Stratford, Newport Pagnell, Bletchley and Woburn Sands, and further afield by arrangement. Online sessions have no geography, and I already work that way with individual clients, which you can read about on the online counselling page.

I also provide clinical supervision to other therapists, which is worth knowing if your organisation employs counselling or support staff who need it.