Interventions to improve wellbeing at work: the FAMILY approach

Organisations are increasingly promoting employees’ health and wellbeing, given that happy workers are more productive and cope better with the high demands of the work environment than their dissatisfied counterparts. A promising approach to promote wellbeing at work is the focus on enhancing and supporting employees’ strengths use at work and personal resources.

Against this background, this project aims at investigating the effects of a newly developed positive psychology intervention designed to improve employees’ wellbeing, i.e. the FAMILY intervention. Such an intervention program centres around six dimensions, which content is designed to develop and channel employees’ strengths and resources by supporting employees’ positive reframe of emotional work situations, the identification of possible challenging work situations, and structuring reflection and meaning-making processes to support employees’ awareness of work identity beliefs.

Specifically, the six dimensions refer to Framing (F), i.e. helping participants focusing on the positive rather than on the negative aspects of work by using their strengths; Attitudes (A), i.e. supporting employees in the adoption of a positive perspective when facing challenging work tasks by leveraging on self-identified strengths and personal resources; Meaningfulness (M), i.e. supporting employees’ awareness about the meaning attributed to their work; Identity (I), i.e. facilitating reflection on career aspirations; Leading-self (L), i.e. supporting employees planning on how to translate personal aspiration into concrete plans; and Yoked-together (Y), i.e. raising awareness and reflecting on the social processes defining one’s work role.

By providing empirical evidence on the role of such an intervention to improve employees’ wellbeing, personal resources, and strengths use, this project contributes to advance knowledge on how positive experiences (contexts, strengths and virtues, personal resources) can be used to protect against occupational risks.