On the 20th of February a group of Project Management MSc students from Southampton Business School called Eudaimoina team composed of students: Sitsofe Banini, Nikitas Ntakos and Brandon Dyer-Pallister led by Viridiana Valdez delivered a wellbeing event to academics and professionals from a range of industries. The event was part of the team’s extracurricular engagement with the Association for Project Management (APM) ‘PM Challenge’ which is an opportunity to manage and deliver a project in a real-life scenario. The team was assigned with a mentor, an experienced Project Manager (Jed Gorka) who provided guidance over 5 months with the purpose to enhance the teams career performance.

The challenge of the team was to provide a project plan that identifies smart outputs and benefits to be delivered, associated resources, methodology and key risks within a designated budget provided by APM. The team delivered two reports (progress and final), which demonstrated how it delivered the project outputs and benefits defined in the original project plan using a range of competences. Finally, the competition culminated with an online 10 minutes presentation to the highly experienced project professionals APM judging panel. Eudomonia and Bournemouth, Winchester, Portsmouth and BAE Systems teams adapted to give their online presentation on March 17th with a professional and positive approach to this year’s challenge given the current challenges. Eudaimonia Team was announced as the winner of the competition on March 19th receiving many recognitions from assistants and professionals involved.

The aim of the project was to increase the awareness of wellbeing in the workplace, which led to a high-quality event for local practitioners and academics. Supported by their programme leader of the MSc Project Management, Dr. Ramesh Vahidi who initially promoted this challenge within her students, the team also managed to be sponsored by the Project Management Institute, Association for Project Management (Wessex Branch) and Southampton Business School.

The event was supported voluntarily by 4 seasoned experts who shared their experiences and research with audience about wellbeing as a crucial and meaningful theme in the current industry. Proceedings were chaired by the Head of the Southampton Business School, Professor Martin Broad, who introduced each guest professional along with a background into their relevant research/expertise. After each talk, Professor Martin Broad led a short Q&A session.

The talks covered a multitude of topics:

• ‘Your Brain on stress’ by Zoryna O’Donnell;
• ‘How to refuel your mental wellbeing’ by Dee Burrowes;
• ‘Balance in work life’ by Dr. Mina Beigi;
• ‘Physical wellbeing’ by Andy Haigh.

Project Management Institute supported the team with the incredible participation of Dee Burrowes who displayed her extensive knowledge in how to replenish your brain and engage with the audience by asking the simple question “When was the last time you were happy?”. This question sparked great engagement from the attendees who were surprised by the impact of just taking a couple of minutes to think of their own happiness. The event was a great success offering a networking platform to exchange different perspectives and build relationships that can potentially benefit several industries to start building a workplace culture of healthy high-performance. It received positive feedback from the attendees and the team delivered the project successfully achieving the scope of the project initially proposed to the APM. It triggered an increased interest in wellbeing in academia and industry and since completion of the event the team had been contacted by several academics and professionals asking to organise another wellbeing event.