Focuses on supporting the wellbeing of those who work in difficult situations, including challenging environments and exposure to distressing material.
The Wellbeing at Work Community of Practice (CoP) brings together practitioners, researchers, policy leads, and operational leaders to address critical gaps in early signals of poor wellbeing, barriers to reporting and response, and data-driven interventions.
Identified challenges include:
- Lack of research on different roles, exposure modality, and evaluation of interventions.
- Organisational Culture factors including normalisation of working practices that challenge wellbeing, and barriers to reporting.
- Ethical and practical constraints around data use, personal devices, and HR information.
- Wellbeing support gaps, with an absence of reliable data on intervention effectiveness.
These issues are shared across sectors, yet work is fragmented. The CoP will provide the structure to coordinate learning, test approaches, and build a coherent evidence base.
Objectives
The CoP will be output focused. The CoP’s first course of action will be to agree its objectives. Some of the work that could be undertaken includes:
- Develop shared understanding of early signals of poor wellbeing, risk factors and how we can most effectively measure these factors.
- Identify and evaluate practical interventions for different roles and contexts (e.g., online moderators versus overseas deployment).
- Strengthen reporting culture by exploring psychological safety, trust, and cultural change.
- Address ethical considerations around data use, privacy, and unintended consequences.
- Share learning and good practice across sectors to speed up improvement.
How to join
Membership will be representatives from academia, national security, defence and law enforcement. An initial set-up meeting will determine the best format moving forward, which may include quarterly workshops, thematic working groups, and a shared knowledge repository.