What happens when 2 professional service providers , rather by chance, meet in a joint assignment with a client? In the case of IDEWE, an external occupational health service, and Stanwick Consultants, a management consultant, something unique happens. An interview with 2 main players that stood at the cradle of this cooperation: Liese Huysmans, prevention advisor for psychosocial aspects and Nick Vanhalst, director at Stanwick.
Liese: "Although we were hired independently by the customer, it soon became clear that IDEWE and Stanwick could complement each other and that we were very complementary in the common project, the setting up and development of a strategy around psychosocial well-being.
Nick: " While we initially took care of the project, and IDEWE rather the work form and legal framework, over time the roles have converged. Today, we don't ask ourselves who does what but it just "flows"."
Liese: " Initially, we established an approach with the client whereby we rolled out a unique and powerful approach to carry out the 'risk analysis for psychosocial aspects' stipulated by law. All employees enter into a dialogue with their teams in a 5-year cycle about how their mental well-being is doing: how am I doing, how are you doing, how are we doing?"
Nick: "From there, the need quickly grew to make managers in particular stronger in monitoring their own mental well-being, that of their team members in order to be able to intervene in the right way if necessary. The topics covered in the workshops are healthy resilience, the stress mechanism and the evolution of burnout, dealing with stress signals, the role of the manager in this and having conversations with employees in different stages of illness or absence. Participants find this very useful and a real blessing. I see executives rooting around with their people's misery and asking themselves out loud 'why didn't I notice this sooner, dammit!"
Liese: "The workshops are rolled out together by IDEWE and Stanwick, facilitated together, no one noticing the difference between the 2 service providers. Probably has everything to do with our shared value pattern and our common, integrated view on people. Being able to offer this feels like a real luxury for the participants: people struggling with the same thing, across hierarchical boundaries in a facilitated setting, this remains special. And as a facilitator and sounding board, we can fall back on our experience as psychologists, Nick adds his years of experience as a manager."
The partnership between IDEWE and Stanwick is also taking shape. Now we see even better where we can complement each other in terms of expertise and there is also enough overlap in style. What makes us truly unique is the attention for the individual and the fact that we address the management of our customers.
The final word is to Nick and Liese.
Nick: "The collaboration feels familiar and collegial. It gives me a good feeling that on the one hand I can sometimes improvise within the theme of mental well-being but that there is also an expert next to me who also guards the law. I call this guarding the orthodoxy, when and how can and should I escalate things."
Liese: "Oh well, I don't always want to be seen as an expert. On the contrary, IDEWE and Stanwick find themselves primarily in the pragmatic and we make a sometimes leaden subject (psychosocial well-being) easier and more manageable."
Do you have questions about the guidance of the psychosocial well-being of your employees, teams, departments or organization, workshops stress & resilience , the management of personal energy ... contact us without engagement. We will help you further.
Jean-Paul Nauwelaers
