Culture Shift delivers creative Wellbeing at Work and School INSET workshops

For the past year, Culture Shift has been working with the East Sussex County Council Public Health team to develop and pilot a creative journalling module for the Wellbeing at Work award programme. See https://wellbeingatwork.eastsussex.gov.uk for more details.

The programme provides a framework and training to support all aspects of employee health with over 150 businesses and organisations already accredited at the County standard for workplace wellbeing.

When we registered to participate in the programme we started to explore how the work we do at Culture Shift might translate into the workplace.  The result has been a series of pilot activity over the past year, which started with Julia making a presentation at the Wellbeing at Work 2025 awards ceremony, followed by workshops with a variety of employers, designed to focus on participatory creative journalling as an activity to impact positively on health for employers and employees (with subsequent benefits on working relationships, collaborative working, professional development and productivity).

These workshop sessions have been great fun to facilitate and have reminded us how precious moments of creativity can be and that with very basic materials and some imagination these moments can be found anywhere, even in the workplace!

“I just wanted to take the opportunity to say a huge thank you for inviting me to attend the session with Julia Roberts on Wednesday.  It was just truly magical.  I could literally feel the benefits that we were all experiencing through the creative journalling session.  On a personal note, I was feeling so super-chill and relaxed afterwards and still even today.  I think we can all think of work experiences where we have felt/ or feel stressed – so this is so super-important to everyone’s health and wellbeing.” Workshop participant 

The feedback from our final pilot workshop in January is helping to inform the design and future delivery of this training and resources and we look forward to working on this with the Wellbeing at Work team.  If you aren’t already part of the scheme, you should get involved.  It’s totally free and is a great way to look after ourselves at work!

And as a result of this work, we have now developed a creative journalling INSET session for schools which we delivered for the first time to a group of 60+ non-teaching staff at Willingdon School in October 2025. 

“The training provided us with an opportunity to come together as a support staff body, in a fun and relaxed environment with activities that made us focus on our wellbeing, instead of always putting everyone else first.” 

If you are interested in discussing Creative facilitation training at your organisation, visit our Training page or email: info@cultureshift.org.uk