Well-being, austerity and policing

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to deepen conceptual understanding of workplace well-being in policing, particularly personal resilience. This is a conceptual paper reviewing and discussing contemporary literature with a focus on themes congruent with personal resilience in a police setting. This paper considers well-being in the context of police work in the UK, how resilience factors impact on an individual’s working life and the implications for policing generally. People can be trained to improve their resilience by a host of activities and approaches. These skills can be used to assess their own levels of resilience, and inform how to manage others through a variety of techniques. Some resilience factors are completely out of an individual’s locus of control; but many are not. Organisations can contribute by providing training and creating environments where individuals can practice these approaches as part and parcel of their daily activity, and flourish from doing so.