Securing a healthy working environment for individuals, team and organizations with PHOLA’s corporate mental wellness programmes: Narrative and Psychosocial Therapy.

The Phola sisebenzi’ programme focuses on the wellbeing of employees. It seeks tosupport employees to improve their productivity. The mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of employees is important and needs to be prioritized to build a sustainable environment of growth.

Phola works tirelessly through the Phola sisebenzi programme to promote employee wellbeing and productivity, using the Tree of life strength-based methodology. As a strength-based methodology, it seeks to create empathy, understanding, cohesiveness and to humanize the workplace. The methodology is based on supporting individuals, teams, and organizations to escape the trap of negative and problem saturated work environment.

Problem statement

 Within a corporate place, it is the duty of employees to provide good and profitable services to the company, and to do so it requires employees to be grounded in their mental stability. However, work environments can be difficult due to personal or individual stressors and the ever-demanding socio-economic context that we all live and work in. Covid-19 brough a lot of challenges for individuals, teams, organizations, and the country as a whole; many people are still struggling with the aftermath of the pandemic. These struggles are proved by a sharp increase of mental illness in staff
conflict, workplace-bully, exploitation, poor work-life balance, anxiety, and depression.

Personal challenges experienced by employees in their families and homes also showup in the workplace. This can include marital problems, experiences of abuse, drug and alcohol misuse, financial instability, self-doubt, anger, lack of motivation and fear. All the above can lead to poor performance at work, presentism, absenteeism.Companies can lose a lot of revenue if employee mental health concerns are notadequately addressed. Therefore, PHOLA, aims to provide employees, teams, and organizations with a solution to create healthy working environments.

Proposed project

Using the Tree of life story telling intervention, PHOLA aims to:
• Improve employee engagement
• Attract new talent and increase staff retention
• Reduce sickness absence and presenteeism
• Improve performance and productivity
• Increase creativity, efficiency, and innovation
• Strengthen team morale, relationships, and communication
• Humanizing the workplace

A partnership with PHOLA will deliver the following services and outcomes:
• Access to Psychosocial practitioners that will provide individuals, groups, andorganizations with mental health services.
• Services are offered virtually and in-person.
• PHOLA can customize its services to fit with organizational needs and goals.
• Psychosocial practitioners use narrative therapy, psycho-social therapy, and culturally sensitive mental wellness programmes.

Hypothetic Project Outcomes

In the success of this proposed project, these will be the following results:
• There will be an increase in the psychosocial well-being of the employees.
• The employees will be highly productive.
• Build on new ideas, creativity, efficiency, and innovation.
• Increase in team building initiatives, establishing group cohesion, conflict
resolution, trauma debriefing and dealing with organizational culture.
• Improve on team engagements, relationships, and communication.
• The company’s revenues will increase along with employee incentives.