How To Build An Ideal User Journey In Your Wellbeing Programmes With Gary Butterfield

Your original background was in fitness and then in 2011 you moved over to HR, worked at the University of Sheffield and got into the wellness space. 

It’d be useful to learn more about that transition and what motivated it. 

That’s right. I started my career in the fitness industry after studying Sports Science at university. That was always where I wanted to be because, fundamentally, I wanted to help people improve their wellbeing, in whatever way wellbeing meant to them. My motivation wasn't simply to get people fitter or stronger; it was about supporting people through whatever journey they were on and helping them become healthier, happier versions of themselves.

Initially, I worked with around 20 to 25 people at any one time on their individual goals. Like most fitness professionals, I saw plenty of the usual objectives: people wanting to lose weight, tone up, run their first 5K or simply become more active. I enjoyed all of that work, but what I found particularly rewarding were the more individual challenges where I could make a deeper difference in someone's life.

I worked with people who struggled with confidence, individuals recovering from injury or rehabilitation, and others pursuing ambitions in professional sport. I had the opportunity to coach numerous athletes and also spent time working in professional rugby. 

I was a Strength and Conditioning Coach under Stuart Lancaster, working with Leeds during their Premiership season in 2008. Around the same time I also worked with England Rugby League as a Strength and Conditioning Coach during the 2008 Rugby League World Cup in Australia. Those experiences were incredible and gave me the opportunity to work at a very high level within elite sport while still doing what I loved most: helping people perform at their best.

Despite enjoying the industry enormously, I left full-time fitness in 2011, which is where the transition into HR began. There were two key reasons for that decision. The first was an experience that has gone on to underpin a huge amount of the work I still do today. I had my annual appraisal with my line manager, and I remember genuinely looking forward to it. I thought we were going to have a proper conversation about my future and where I wanted my career to go. I was excited to have one of those big, future-focused conversations about growth and development.

Instead, the meeting became 55 minutes of discussion about sales targets. It was question after question about targets. "Are you going to hit your targets, Gary?" "What are you doing to hit your targets?" "How will you improve your numbers?" 

Then, with about five minutes left at the end of the meeting, I got the brief, almost token question "How are you, Gary? Are you happy?" That was it. The appraisal finished, and I remember walking away feeling that the conversation had completely missed what actually mattered.

The very next day I handed in my notice and decided to leave the industry full-time.

Around that time an opportunity came up at the University of Sheffield. While I was working in the fitness industry, I'd become good friends with the University's HR Director. He wanted to develop something around wellbeing at the University, although at that point nobody was entirely sure what that would look like. 

The higher education sector was going through a significant period of change. The thinking was that wellbeing wasn't just  the right thing to do, it could also become a genuine reason why talented people would choose to stay at the University of Sheffield rather than move elsewhere.

The University was competing with institutions such as Manchester, Leeds, York, Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge. The ambition was to create an environment where people genuinely felt they belonged, where they felt cared for, and where they wanted to build their careers.

That message resonated with me immediately because it aligned perfectly with why I'd entered the fitness industry in the first place. I joined the University of Sheffield as a wellbeing consultant, and that became my introduction to the world of HR. I stayed there for nine years, and during that time the wellbeing work we developed far exceeded anything we had originally expected.

Not only did it gain national recognition, but far more importantly, people across the University genuinely used it and told us how much of a difference it was making to their working lives.  We were so proud of what it had become.

Because of that success, in 2015 we launched a subsidiary company called Everyday Juice Limited to help organisations beyond higher education develop their own wellbeing approaches based on what we'd learned at Sheffield.

There were lots of different elements to the work, but two principles sat at the centre of everything we built. The first was the user journey. We wanted accessing wellbeing support to be as simple and intuitive as possible, so that people could quickly find the help they actually needed without unnecessary barriers. 

The second principle was community. For me, wellbeing has never been about simply giving people more information because information already exists everywhere. What people often lack is connection. They need opportunities to meet colleagues through shared interests, common passions and activities that bring people together.

We built that community in all sorts of ways. We organised Lego sessions, running groups, sword dancing, boot camps, nutrition seminars, Scalextric competitions, beer tasting evenings and countless other activities across the University campus. The activities themselves weren't really the point. They simply became vehicles for helping people connect with one another.

Through Everyday Juice, we then helped other organisations create similar wellbeing experiences, supported by technology that made those communities easier to access and participate in.

Unfortunately, like many organisations, the business was heavily affected by the pandemic. In 2023, the business closed its doors, which was a difficult period for me personally.

I'd invested everything into that business. My identity was wrapped up in it. My future was wrapped up in it. I genuinely expected that to be the work I'd be doing for the rest of my career, right through until retirement. When it suddenly disappeared, I had to spend a lot of time asking myself what the future now looked like and what parts of the work I genuinely loved enough to build something new around.

When I reflected on it, three themes kept coming back. The first was strategic wellbeing work with senior leaders and helping organisations get more value from the wellbeing investments they were already making without immediately asking them to spend more money. I loved helping organisations make better use of what they already had before looking for new investment.

The second was training line managers. That passion comes directly from my own experience of that appraisal years earlier. I developed a tool called the Conversation Canvas, which is designed to help line managers have meaningful wellbeing conversations with the people they manage. Rather than focusing purely on targets or performance, it gives managers a practical framework for building genuine relationships first, creating the trust that allows wellbeing conversations to happen naturally when they need to.

The third area was working directly with employees themselves. I'm not interested in telling people things they already know, like eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day or taking 10,000 steps. Most people already understand those messages. What I enjoy is giving people practical wellbeing models they can adapt to their own lives. Tools that allow them to interpret wellbeing in ways that are personally meaningful rather than simply attending another awareness session.

Those three areas eventually became the foundations of Joy Junction, the consultancy I run today. Most of the organisations I work with are fairly large, typically employing around 4,000 - 5,000 people. I do a lot of work within the public sector, particularly across the NHS, local government, national government and charities. I also work with private sector organisations too.

In your lived experience of all of the work you’ve done, why do you think it’s so hard for learning to bridge into behaviour change within an organisation in terms of wellbeing training?

There are a few different elements to it, and I don't think you can ever reduce it to a single factor because behaviour change is complex. The biggest barrier for me is time. We're all busy people. Line managers in particular are what we often describe as the squeezed middle. They're balancing expectations from senior leadership while simultaneously supporting their own teams, and there's only so much capacity in the day.

Within the Conversation Canvas, I use the Five Ways to Wellbeing framework, one of which is to keep learning. Learning is central to personal development, but one of the biggest misconceptions organisations make is assuming that opportunity is the issue.

I was working with an NHS Trust on the Conversation Canvas, and originally one of the questions within the framework was do we give you opportunities to learn? At the time, I thought that was a good question because it encouraged people to think about their development.

However, one of the NHS wellbeing leads challenged me on that and said opportunities aren't the problem. We have learning opportunities everywhere. We've got courses, webinars, workshops, e-learning and resources coming out of our ears. The issue isn't access to learning. The issue is time.

That really changed my thinking. People don't learn effectively while they're rushing between wards, trying to keep on top of patient care or simply attempting to get through another manic  day. Learning needs space. It requires the mental capacity to stop, reflect and absorb something new. If people are constantly firefighting, even the best training in the world won't have the impact it should.

The second major factor is relationships. You can still learn if you have a poor relationship with your manager or your team, but you can't prioritise learning properly because the psychological safety simply isn't there. Without trust, learning tends to become something people do privately rather than something that's actively supported and developed within the workplace.

You might watch videos in your own time or read books at home, and that's valuable, but that's really only scratching the surface. The real value comes when you're able to put that learning into practice inside your organisation, and that's where a supportive line manager becomes absolutely critical.

If you're learning something that's work-related, you need opportunities to apply it. Take someone who wants to move into management as an example. That's a perfectly reasonable ambition to have. There are plenty of leadership books you can read, countless YouTube videos to watch and podcasts  that can give you useful ideas and perspectives.

But eventually you've reached the limit of what self-directed learning can give you. At some point you need someone to let you shadow a manager. You need someone to involve you in projects. You need opportunities to understand how budgets work, how teams are managed, how difficult conversations are handled and how decisions are actually made within an organisation.

Those opportunities don't happen by accident. They come from having a line manager who knows you, trusts you and is willing to create space for you to grow. If that relationship doesn't exist, your learning eventually stalls because you simply can't gain the practical experience that turns knowledge into capability.

A subject that interests me is wellbeing washing. What are your thoughts on how organisations can avoid it? 

It's a massive subject, and it's a very real issue. I work primarily within the public sector and, contrary to what people often hear in the media, I actually think the public sector does a really good job when it comes to providing wellbeing support. There are lots of fantastic services available and many organisations genuinely care about the wellbeing of their people.

Where organisations tend to fall down isn't necessarily the quality of the support they provide. It always comes back to the user journey. I always compare it to using Google. If you search for something online, most people only ever look at the first page of results. Some might venture onto the second page, but very few people are willing to dig through pages three and four trying to find what they're looking for.

Your wellbeing proposition works exactly the same way. If employees have to search through multiple intranet pages, different websites, numerous platforms and various logins just to find support, they simply won't use it. It doesn't matter how good the service itself is if the journey to access it is complicated. As organisations grow, this naturally becomes more difficult because there isn't one provider that delivers every wellbeing service an organisation could ever need.

Instead, organisations accumulate providers over time. You might have an Employee Assistance Programme from one company, occupational health from another, learning platforms from somewhere else, financial wellbeing resources provided by another supplier and physical wellbeing programmes coming from yet another organisation. Responsibility might sit across HR, Occupational Health, Estates, Learning and Development, Sports Services or numerous other departments.

Over time, all of these different systems begin to stack on top of one another, creating a complex network that's incredibly difficult for employees to navigate. That complexity almost never gets addressed.

That's where the first phase of any wellbeing strategy should begin. I help  organisations to create one comprehensive list of every wellbeing service they currently provide. It doesn't have to be complicated. A simple Google Sheet is often more than sufficient and has the advantage of being free, collaborative and scalable.

The first step is identifying your primary services i.e. the things you've deliberately procured as an organisation.

That might include Occupational Health, your Employee Assistance Programme, your Learning and Development platform, Cycle to Work schemes and every other significant wellbeing investment you've made.

Once you've done that, you move on to the secondary services. These are the additional resources that often come bundled alongside those larger contracts but are frequently forgotten about. For example, does your Occupational Health provider also offer free ergonomic assessments for people working remotely? Does your EAP include a wellbeing hub with articles, videos and self-help resources that nobody knows exists? These additional services are often incredibly valuable, but because nobody has mapped them properly, employees never discover them.

Once you've built that complete picture, the next step is empowering line managers. This doesn't have to be through the Conversation Canvas specifically. There are plenty of other good tools available as well. The important thing is giving line managers enough confidence to understand what support exists and when it's appropriate to signpost someone towards it. 

If a manager understands what's available, knows how employees access those services, understands whether there's a referral process, whether somebody needs to create a login or whether there's any cost involved, they become a much more effective first point of contact.

Those two stages of simplifying the user journey and equipping line managers to navigate it won't solve every cultural challenge within an organisation, but they address a huge proportion of what people describe as wellbeing washing.

You're saying it's about empowering the managers to be spokespeople and practicising what they preach right?  

Exactly. It's about helping line managers become professional signposters. They're not expected to become wellbeing experts. They don't suddenly need to know everything about financial wellbeing, mental health, physical health or nutrition, and they certainly don't need to become counsellors or therapists. That's not their role, and I don't think we should place that expectation on them.

A line manager's primary responsibility is still to manage their team. What we have to do is give them the confidence and the practical tools to manage people well. If someone in their team is struggling, they shouldn't feel as though they have to solve every problem themselves. Instead, they should understand what support exists within the organisation and know how to guide that person towards it.

That's why I always come back to the user journey first. Before we train line managers, we need to make sure the wellbeing proposition  itself is easy to navigate. If managers don't know what services exist or where to find them, then even the best intentions won't solve the problem.

You can't expect somebody to confidently signpost another person if they don't know where they're signposting them to.

So simplifying the wellbeing offer and then equipping managers to use it effectively really go hand in hand. Once you've done those two things, managers become much more confident, employees become much more likely to access support, and that whole issue of wellbeing washing starts to reduce because people are actually engaging with the services that already exist.

On the subject of signposting, Mental Health First Aid can be considered a signposting programme. But there is an opinion of it not going far enough to create preventative measures.

What do you think of MHFA and the conversation of building a preventative culture instead of just an awareness culture?

I have a love-and-loath relationship with Mental Health First Aid, wellbeing champions and similar initiatives. As concepts, I think they're brilliant. The principles behind them are absolutely sound, and they come from a really good place. They raise awareness, they encourage conversations and they create visible advocates for wellbeing within organisations. There are lots of positives.

At the same time, I think we need to recognise some of the limitations. Generally speaking, the people who volunteer to become Mental Health First Aiders or wellbeing champions are already passionate about wellbeing. They're often the people who are already convinced of its importance. In many ways, you're preaching to the converted because these are individuals who already care deeply about supporting others.

What sometimes concerns me is what happens afterwards. We rightly spend time teaching these individuals how to recognise signs that somebody may be struggling and how to start supportive conversations. But we don't always spend enough time asking a different question, which is how do we support the people who are doing the supporting?

They're often carrying a significant emotional load. They're not counsellors, and I completely understand that Mental Health First Aid training never claims they're supposed to be. I know that's not the expectation. But these people care. They want to help. That's why they volunteered in the first place.

Whether organisations ask them to or not, many of them naturally take on more emotional responsibility than perhaps they should. They become the person colleagues turn to, and over time that can become a heavy burden if there isn't appropriate support around them.

I also think organisations sometimes overestimate what these roles can realistically achieve on their own. Nothing, in my opinion, will ever be as impactful as having a strong relationship between an employee and their line manager. That's where meaningful prevention happens.

Unfortunately, some organisations introduce Mental Health First Aiders almost as a sticking plaster. It's as though they can say we've dealt with mental health because we've trained a number of Mental Health First Aiders.

In many cases, it's a cop-out. If you're not also investing in your line managers and teaching them how to have meaningful wellbeing conversations with the people they manage, then you're missing arguably the most influential relationship within the workplace.

Whether an organisation uses the Conversation Canvas, Mind's Wellbeing Action Plan or any other framework doesn't matter to me. The important thing is that managers are equipped to build trust, have regular conversations and recognise when somebody might need additional support. If we really want to move the needle on employee wellbeing, we have to start by developing better line managers.

From a commercial standpoint, how can ROI be framed to the decision-makers who have the power to bring wellbeing training programmes into an organisation? 

There are plenty of different studies out there, and if you're looking hard enough you can usually find a statistic that supports almost any argument you're trying to make. But generally speaking, one figure comes up time and time again.

The broad consensus is that for every pound invested in employee wellbeing, organisations see somewhere in the region of seven pounds returned. If you strip away all the theory and look at it purely from a financial perspective, it's a fairly compelling proposition.

If you gave me one pound and I gave you eight pounds back, you'd probably be pretty pleased with that investment. When you start applying that kind of return across an organisation employing several thousand people, the financial impact becomes very significant.

Retention is another major area where wellbeing makes a tangible commercial difference. Take the public sector, for example, particularly the NHS. The cost of replacing experienced employees is enormous. Organisations spend huge amounts on recruitment, onboarding, agency staff and temporary cover simply to fill vacancies that have been created because people have chosen to leave.

Within the NHS especially, talented people are constantly being recruited by other Trusts or moving elsewhere within the sector. Competition for skilled employees is incredibly high. Depending on which research you look at, replacing a single employee can cost anywhere between 50% and 200% of that person's annual salary. That's an extraordinary figure.

If good wellbeing support helps retain that individual, you've potentially saved the organisation an enormous amount of money before you've even started considering recruitment costs, training, lost productivity or agency staffing. It quickly becomes a win-win situation.

People who enjoy their work and feel supported generally stay longer. They also tend to be happier, more engaged and ultimately more productive while they're there.

When people genuinely care about the organisation they're part of, when they feel connected to it and supported by it, they often contribute in ways that extend beyond simply fulfilling a job description. That kind of commitment isn't something you can force. It's something you create by building an environment where people actually want to stay, grow and contribute.

How do you make sure that behaviour change is being implemented once your training is done?  Do you have any mechanisms that help you keep track of how learners are progressing through their wellbeing journey and that companies are following up?

There are a few different ways that I try to do that, although one of the realities of being an external consultant is that there are naturally some limitations.

Because I'm not inside the organisation day in and day out, it's difficult to continually measure long-term behavioural change in the same way an internal team could. Once the training has finished, people go back into their organisations and carry on with their day-to-day work, so I don't have direct visibility of everything that's happening.

What I do try to do is maintain regular contact with my HR clients and the people who commissioned the work. I'll check in with them periodically, ask how things are progressing, what they're seeing, what conversations are happening and whether they're noticing any changes in confidence or behaviour across their managers and teams.

One of the most consistent pieces of feedback I receive is from line managers themselves. They often tell me that, after using the Conversation Canvas, they simply feel more confident about having wellbeing conversations. That's important because the Conversation Canvas was never designed to be a script. It isn't a list of questions that people are expected to read word for word. It's much more of a conversation starter.

Its purpose is to remove that awkwardness people often feel when they're trying to begin a wellbeing conversation. It gives managers enough structure to get the conversation moving, but then allows the discussion to develop naturally depending on the individual sitting in front of them.

The ultimate goal is that one day the Conversation Canvas becomes completely unnecessary. If somebody has used it enough times that meaningful wellbeing conversations now feel more natural, then it's done its job. I don't want people relying on the tool forever. I want them to build enough confidence and experience that they no longer need it.

The feedback I receive suggests that's exactly what's happening. But what excites me even more than that is seeing people take the tool and begin using it for purposes I never originally designed it for.

I first created the Conversation Canvas purely for general wellbeing conversations between two colleagues. I developed it in 2018 and over the years organisations have found all sorts of different applications for it that I'd never anticipated.

One of those is onboarding. Some organisations now use the Conversation Canvas as part of welcoming new starters into the business.

For example, if you look at elements such as connect and keep learning from the Five Ways to Wellbeing framework, managers can use those conversations to understand whether somebody is settling into the team, whether they're forming relationships with colleagues and whether they feel supported during those crucial first few weeks.

They're also using it to explore whether people have been given enough information and enough time to get up to speed in their new role. Have they received the right resources? Do they understand what's expected of them? Have they actually had the opportunity to process everything they've been asked to learn?

Those conversations become incredibly valuable because they highlight issues long before they become performance problems. I've also seen organisations use it during return-to-work processes. That might be after a period of long-term sickness, maternity leave, paternity leave or any extended period away from work.

When someone has been absent for several months, the team they're returning to often isn't the same team they left. There may be new colleagues, a different line manager, different priorities or entirely new ways of working. That person needs to be reintegrated properly rather than simply expected to pick up where they left off.

I've even seen organisations use the Conversation Canvas for exit interviews. I find that particularly interesting. When somebody leaves an organisation, they're often heading towards what they believe are greener pastures. But we all know that the grass isn't always greener somewhere else. Sometimes people only realise how good they had it once they've left. If organisations manage that exit process authentically and meaningfully, it leaves a much more positive lasting impression.

Then, if that new opportunity doesn't work out, there's a much greater chance that talented people will come back. You create what's often called the "boomerang employee" effect, where experienced staff return because they remember being treated well.

The fact that a tool originally designed for one purpose is now supporting onboarding, return-to-work conversations, exit interviews and numerous other people processes is vindicating for me. It tells me that a difference is being made. 

Looking ahead, one thing I'd really like to introduce at Joy Junction is something inspired by my time at the University of Sheffield. The University ran a programme called Sheffield Leader. It was a six-week leadership programme where anyone in the organisation could take part, regardless of their role. Cleaners, porters, administrators, academics, senior executives etc. 

Once you'd completed the programme, you became part of the Sheffield Leader alumni community. What made it so special wasn't the six weeks of training. It was the fact that the learning never stopped. 

Throughout your entire career at the University, there were workshops, webinars, networking opportunities, roadshows, projects and events that kept bringing people back together. You'd see senior executives sitting alongside junior colleagues, all learning from one another because everyone belonged to the same community. The networking opportunities and ongoing development that were created were phenomenal.

That's something I'd love to build into Joy Junction. My vision is that once somebody has completed Conversation Canvas training, they don't simply leave and never hear from me again. What happens is they become part of an alumni community.

Going back to your HR background, what has your experience been like of different functions like L&D being lumped in with HR or being kept separate? 

It's an interesting question because wellbeing often gets lumped into HR as well. I think that's where Learning and Development and wellbeing belong. I know not everybody would agree with that, but HR often describes itself as the people profession, and when you think about it, L&D, wellbeing, equality, diversity and inclusion, employee engagement and all of these different disciplines are fundamentally about people.

I don't have an issue with them sitting within HR. The challenge isn't where they sit organisationally but that HR itself is siloed.  Like any profession, you have specialists. You have Learning and Development specialists, wellbeing specialists, EDI specialists, HR business partners, employee relations specialists and generalists.

Everyone becomes highly knowledgeable in their own discipline, but sometimes communication between those disciplines isn't as strong as it could be.

I certainly saw that within higher education. Within a university, you also have HR professionals embedded across different faculties and departments, which naturally made communication more complex because people were spread across such a large organisation.

Ultimately though, collaboration comes back to organisational purpose. Every organisation should have a clear idea of where they’re  trying to get to over the next five years. What's the vision? What's the ambition?

Once that's clear, everybody should have a role in creating that plan because people are much more likely to commit to something they've helped build. People support what they help create. That's true whether you're talking about Learning and Development, wellbeing or any other function.

The other thing we have to recognise is that wellbeing and learning are fundamentally interconnected. You can't learn effectively if your wellbeing is poor. If you don't feel psychologically safe, if you're overwhelmed, exhausted or constantly anxious, learning becomes incredibly difficult. Equally, learning is an important contributor to wellbeing.

People don't generally feel fulfilled if they believe they're trapped in a role with no opportunity grow, develop or progress. Learning gives people purpose, confidence and momentum. The same applies to EDI. Whether somebody feels included, valued and able to bring their authentic self to work has a direct impact on both wellbeing and learning.

How do you keep learning and evolving in your work?

Running your own business has a funny way of forcing you to keep learning because you don't have a choice. When you're responsible for everything, you're constantly having to develop new skills. One day you're working with clients, the next you're trying to improve your systems, then you're thinking about marketing, finance or technology. So learning becomes part of everyday life rather than something you deliberately schedule into your diary.

From a business perspective, I'm always picking things up as I go. I read a lot of different publications, I follow people whose thinking I respect and I'm always looking for ideas that I can adapt rather than simply copy. I don't think there's one single source that contains all the answers. Instead, I like taking ideas from different places and thinking about how they might apply to the organisations I work with.

One resource I use a lot is Reddit. I love Reddit because there are so many communities where people are openly discussing real challenges they're experiencing. Whether it's wellbeing, running a business, technology or almost any other subject, there are always conversations happening between people who are actually dealing with those situations in real life.

I've worked for myself for almost twenty years now, so I've learned that there is enormous value in hearing how other people solve problems. Reddit gives me exposure to those conversations in a way that feels very practical and very authentic.

Like everybody else, I spend time reading articles, following social media, listening to discussions and keeping an eye on developments within the profession. But I try not to consume information passively. Whenever I come across a new idea, I'm always asking myself the same question of how could I apply this? Learning only becomes valuable once you start turning it into something practical.

Artificial intelligence has also become a really important part of how I work. I use AI a great deal, particularly Google Gemini, and it's become an incredibly useful tool in helping me build and improve systems within my business.

For example, I've been developing a large CRM using Google Sheets, and Gemini has been invaluable throughout that process. It's helped me understand ways of building systems that I simply wouldn't have known otherwise, and I've learned an enormous amount through the process itself.

The biggest lesson AI has reinforced for me is to use it as a learning partner that helps you build new skills while you're solving real problems.

From a professional wellbeing perspective, I follow the work of the CIPD.  Like most people in the profession, there are times when I completely agree with what they publish and other times when I don't. I certainly don't think every piece of guidance should be accepted without question. I do think it's important to stay connected to the conversations happening across the profession.

Curiosity is the biggest thing at the end of the day. Stay curious, keep looking around and never assume you've got everything figured out, because there's always another perspective that can help you improve what you do.