WellbeingHuddle - Auckland - 5 December 2025

In 2013, Leading Safety hosted its first Huddles. The initial aim of Huddles was to provide our valued clients and others committed to safe and healthy workplaces an opportunity to explore emerging safety issues, challenge existing assumptions, and provoke new thinking. This aim hasn’t changed, although the focus of Huddles has shifted from safety compliance to the wicked challenges associated with leading health, safety, and wellbeing at work. In 2017, we hosted our first WellbeingHuddles. In 2024, we explored (i) designing effective controls to manage psychosocial risks and (ii) the leadership mindset and practices necessary to foster psychological safety. This year we are putting our focus on the thriving end of the wellbeing continuum.

WellbeingHuddle 2025 – Doing Wellbeing Differently: Thriving By Design (9.30am – 12.30pm)

The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. As such, workplace wellbeing is more than the absence of people struggling or being unwell. This aligns with Safety II thinking, which argues that (i) safety is about the presence of capacity not just the absence of accidents and incidents and (ii) to achieve a state of safety, we need to understand and promote the factors that mean things usually go right.

Perhaps, then, to achieve a state of wellbeing, we need to understand – and design into work – the factors that support people to thrive, not merely control the factors that can cause them to struggle or become unwell. The former include clear roles and responsibilities, stimulating tasks, autonomy, manageable work demands, and positive social relationships.

The 2025 WellbeingHuddles will explore the current thinking and evidence on the drivers of workplace wellbeing as well as bust common myths that can take root in this field.

Please also join us for lunch at 12.30pm and take the opportunity to network with other participants.

Venue

JetPark, 63 Westney Road, Māngere, Auckland

Facilitators

Dr Hillary Bennett, Dr Philip Voss, and Keri Woods – partners at Leading Safety – specialise in health and safety governance, leadership, and culture and have implemented improvement and development processes in organisations from a wide variety of high-hazard sectors in New Zealand and Australia.

Leading Safety also works closely with the Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum, which brings together 400+ business and government CEOs committed to improving the performance of workplace health and safety in New Zealand.