Wellness Action Plan (WAP) Employee Guide
What is a Wellness Action Plan?
A WAP is a personalised, practical tool that can be used in conjunction with your manager – whether there is a mental health challenge or not. It helps to identify what keeps you well at work, what causes you to become unwell and the agreed support that can be offered to boost wellbeing or support people through recovery.
A WAP documents and outlines the practical and reasonable steps that may be required to stay well at work or manage a mental health problem. It also opens up a discussion between you and your manager, to help gain a better understanding of your challenges and experiences and therefore agree reasonable solutions to better support your wellbeing.
WAPs are also particularly helpful during the return to work process, when someone has been off work due to a mental health problem, as they provide a structure for conversations around what support will help and what reasonable adjustments might be useful to consider.
How will the WAP benefit me?
Utilising a WAP will help you to plan in advance for a conversation with your manager about what works and what doesn’t work for you. A WAP can help you to develop approaches to support your mental wellbeing, leading to a reduced likelihood of problems.
If you do experience a mental health problem, you and your manager will then have an idea of the tailored support that could help, or at the least a tool to use in starting that conversation.
The WAP is not only a tool to support you when you are experiencing problems - it also helps identify how an individual’s wellbeing can be proactively improved.
What does a WAP include?
- The approaches you can adopt to support their mental wellbeing
- Early warning signs of poor mental health to look out for
- Any workplace situations which spark poor mental health or excessive stress
- Potential impact of poor mental health on your performance, if any
- What reasonable support is needed from a manager
- Agreed actions and positive steps you will both take if you are experiencing stress or poor mental health
- An agreed time to review the WAP and any support measures which are in place
- Anything else that they feel would be useful in supporting your mental health
The WAP is a working document and is subject to change. You and your manager will work through the form to agree on deliverable and reasonable ways of working, including reasonable adjustments in order to promote positive mental health or address any existing mental health needs.
The Wellness Action Plan
The WAP consists of 8 questions and the form is available separately.
- Plan some time on your own to record the things you would like to raise relating to the questions in the WAP
- Schedule some confidential time with your manager to discuss it
- The WAP should be written and owned by you, expressing helpful support, your personal experience and your needs (both you and your manager will then have to consider what is reasonable and practical within your work environment).
- Consider what would be helpful for your manager to know before the meeting.
- What you are like when you are feeling well and flourishing at work
- What does a work environment that promotes good mental wellbeing looks like for you
- What helps maintain your mental wellbeing
- What coping strategies do you already use for dealing with poor mental health and why have these have been effective
- How you’ve addressed similar challenges in the past
- What hasn’t worked for you in the past and what can be done differently
Confidentiality
The WAP meeting should be held confidentially between you and your manager, with you being made fully aware of how the information will be used, and therefore you need to be aware that you should only provide information that you are happy to share. If you are filling out a WAP as a result of being unwell, you may be asked whether they would consent for a copy of it to be held with HR along with any other information about your wellbeing, such as an Occupational Health reports or a Return to Work plans.
Remember
We are often the experts on our own mental health and the support or adjustments we may need. The WAP provides the space and structure to explore this.
Important note: In order to fulfil NEXT’s duty of care to keep all employees safe at work, we are obliged to break confidentiality if an individual is experiencing a crisis.