The Challenge

The New Zealand Drug Foundation (NZDF) works at the frontline of drug harm prevention and response across Aotearoa New Zealand. For more than 30 years, NZDF has led evidence‑based advocacy, policy development, and harm reduction initiatives—often within highly politicised, stigmatised, and emotionally demanding contexts.

As part of its mission, NZDF also makes a deliberate commitment to employing people with lived and living experience of substance use—a strength that brings authenticity and insight but also heightens the need for robust psychological safety and wellbeing systems.

By late 2023, it was clear the organisation was operating under elevated psychosocial risk, driven by:

  • Exposure to emotionally taxing content across many roles
  • Unsustainable workloads and blurred boundaries
  • Staff feeling “indispensable” and unable to take leave
  • Inconsistent people leadership practices
  • Reduced certainty due to funding pressure and sector instability

Left unaddressed, these risks had the potential to lead to burnout, secondary trauma, disengagement, and long‑term organisational fragility.

The Approach

Rather than relying on assumptions or individual resilience initiatives, NZDF partnered with Umbrella Wellbeing to take a data‑led, systems‑focused approach.

The first step was implementing the Umbrella Wellbeing Pulse Survey—a five‑minute, digital assessment tool based on internationally recognised wellbeing and psychosocial risk measures.

The Umbrella Pulse survey:

  • Established a clear baseline of wellbeing and risk
  • Provided practical, actionable insights for leaders
  • Delivered immediate, personalised feedback and resources to staff
  • Enabled ongoing monitoring and comparison over time

Following the survey completion, Umbrella met with NZDF for a facilitated discussion to present and walk through the results together. This session provided an opportunity to explore what the findings meant in practice, discuss priority actions, and consider how recommendations could be implemented.

Crucially, NZDF chose not to treat the data as a diagnostic tool for leaders alone. Instead, survey findings were shared openly across the entire organisation, building transparency, strengthening trust, and creating collective ownership of both the challenges identified and the solutions going forward.

Organisational Change in Action

Using the Pulse results as a foundation, NZDF undertook organisation‑wide changes embedded in its values and day‑to‑day systems, including:

  • Establishing a Health, Safety and Wellbeing Committee, explicitly integrating wellbeing into safety governance
  • Co‑creating organisational values with all staff and reviewing team performance against values annually
  • Holding challenging, values‑anchored conversations at director and governance level around leadership responsibility as kaitiaki (guardians) of wellbeing
  • Strengthening leadership solidarity and consistency
  • Creating a second‑tier management structure to support communication flow and staff care
  • Actively reducing “indispensable” roles so staff could take leave safely
  • Clarifying access to external supervision and professional support across all roles
  • Maintaining a strong focus on diversity, inclusion, and psychological safety

Rather than trying to “fix” the realities of complex, emotionally demanding work, the organisation focused on building systems that could safely hold it.

The Results

Over a 24‑month period (2024–2025), NZDF achieved measurable and sustained improvements in wellbeing and organisational health:

  • Psychological distress reduced significantly
    Employees reporting low psychological distress increased from 60% to 80%
  • Organisational support transformed
    By 2025, 93% of staff rated organisational support as “great”, significantly outperforming the 58% industry benchmark
  • Overall wellbeing improved
    Staff rating their wellbeing as “great” increased from 46% to 53%, despite growing sector pressures
  • Positive work relationships across the organisation
    All staff rated work relationships and peer support as “not concerning”

These outcomes reflect not just risk reduction, but genuine organisational resilience.

What Made the Difference

Key learnings from this collaboration include:

  • Wellbeing data only drives change when it is shared openly and acted on collectively
  • Values‑led, bottom‑up change can be faster and more sustainable than compliance‑driven approaches
  • Psychosocial risk requires systems change, not individual resilience training
  • Psychological safety improves when leaders explicitly accept their role as wellbeing guardians
  • Short, high‑quality tools reduce survey fatigue and increase trust

Why This Matters

This initiative went beyond compliance or box‑ticking. It required:

  • Leadership courage and accountability
  • Willingness to confront uncomfortable truths
  • Investment in governance, supervision, and structure
  • Sustained commitment over multiple years

The result was meaningful, lasting improvement—not a temporary uplift.

Wider Application

While some aspects of NZDF’s work are unique, this model is highly transferable to other organisations managing complex, high‑risk environments, including:

  • Health and social services
  • Emergency response
  • Advocacy and community organisations

The combination of low‑burden wellbeing measurement and collective ownership of change proves that significant psychosocial risk reduction is possible—even in resource‑constrained settings.