UTS students help icare enhance workforce wellbeing

The prestigious bi-annual competition, involving nearly 400 undergraduate business and management students, and organised by Dr. Rosemary Sainty together with the icare team, showcases remarkable talent and innovation in solving real-world business challenges presented by icare.

This semester’s competition looked for innovative ways to respond to the individual wellbeing needs of icare’s diverse and hybrid workforce. The students worked in small groups, developing business plans that could nurture positive values like optimism, mindfulness, resilience, or authentic leadership.

UTS student Renee Dahbache said she enjoyed the experience of exploring these topics with a large and unique group of students.

You've got students from all walks of life, people who have just finished high school, all the way to people who are doing a second degree midway in their life. You have people from different walks of life with different opinions. So, the fact that you have these individuals all contributing to and developing an idea for icare is actually very important because it gives you a broader scale to work on.

The student’s plans were judged by three senior leaders from icare, who considered the benefits of each for icare’s own unique workforce. Awards were then presented to four winning teams, across the categories of mindfulness, optimism/resilience, character strengths, and positive-authentic leadership.

Award winner Angus Webster said he enjoyed applying management theories he’d been studying to a real-world organisation.

“We did mindfulness as our topic, and I think the thing that really made this project work was we had to make sure that it was achievable by icare. We wanted to make something that we could give to icare, to give to their employees and management, that were really simple to put in place” .

Professor Sara Denize, Associate Dean (Education) of the UTS Business School said the competition offers a great opportunity for students to gain practical experiences ahead of entering the business world.

“For the business school this is absolutely essential. We pride ourselves on providing students with practical authentic learning opportunities. So being able to partner with icare has made a real difference to students in their learning. They get the opportunity to challenge and tackle real issues that make a difference in an organisation,” said Professor Denize.

Heather Smith, the General Manager of icare’s Test & Learning team, said the winning groups all demonstrated sophisticated thinking around the major challenges faced by future workforces, such as the rising mental health pressure in the wider community.

Some of the things that really stood out in the presentations was the deep thinking that the students had done about different parts of the organisation. Many of the presentations talked about not just frontline employees, but what leaders needed to do and how we could build it into ecosystems.

Professor Kylie Readman, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Education and Students) at UTS, said students approached the competition with a deep sense of purpose and focus.

“When students have real world activities to engage in as opposed to assignments, exams that they might do in other subjects, it lifts the quality and it gives them a real reason to be in a group, which sometimes isn't the case. I think whenever we give students those real opportunities, it's a test for them. The idea that somewhere in the future this could really be used, they have to really think through the practical implications of the work that they're doing,” said Ms Readman.

Dr Rosemary Sainty, who is responsible for teaching the students in their core management subject and working with icare to develop the challenge put to the students, believes the competition fosters students as future leaders, by helping them develop the humanistic and compassionate management skillset increasingly sought out by businesses. Drawn from positive psychology, these skills are based on “cultivating individual and organisational flourishing”. With the growing focus on mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, the icare challenge provides students with a well-timed opportunity.  

“Seeing our students learning about these theories - learning about developing their own strengths and those of others, and about a culture of care, and then seeing how that can be applied in a real-world setting, I think that's very inspiring,” she said. “Partnering with icare also supports UTS’s strategic purpose of contributing to the public good and we look forward to continuing this important relationship.”