It’s been a busy time for us as we recently attended Employee Benefits Live – the largest dedicated reward and benefits event in Europe.
As well as getting chance to meet new people and learn about the latest industry solutions, it was also an opportunity for us to present our new approach when it comes to keeping Britain’s workforce fit and healthy.
We spoke to delegates about the benefits of developing a robust health and wellbeing strategy, and unveiled our new toolkit to help HR managers choose, implement and evaluate their own strategies.
Following the event, I thought it would be useful to share a few tips for HR professionals looking to support the health and wellbeing of their employees:
Understand your workforce
Firstly, an organisation must have inspiring leaders and managers who understand their employees. Recognising that everyone is unique and will handle situations differently is key to being able to put processes in place to ensure your staff are at their healthy best. Understand your workforce and recognise each person individually – one size doesn’t fit all.
Have fun
Secondly, a health and wellbeing strategy can offer up an opportunity to inject some fun into an organisation. For me, the walking campaign we were involved with earlier his year is a great example of combining health and wellbeing initiatives with a sense of enjoyment. Three quarters of our workforce got involved in the campaign, and the results speak for themselves – as a company we walked more than 20 million steps, which is nearly 10,400 miles! And encouraging employees to come forward with their own ideas and share feedback is really important.
Act quickly
Last but by no means least, make sure your employees have good, timely access to treatment when needed. It’s clear that the longer someone is left without support, the more difficult it becomes to help them. For example, if someone takes time off following bereavement, you need to make sure the business is supporting them through the very early stages. Whether that involves signposting them to charities or counselling support, it’s crucial that the lines of communication are kept open and support is given from the outset.
This is just a starting point, of course – we all know that keeping your staff fit and healthy is an ongoing and constantly evolving process.
That’s why we’ve created a step by step guide to implementing an effective and relevant health and wellbeing strategy. The aim of our toolkit is to provide HR managers with as much guidance and support as possible to help them through this process and we’re hoping it proves to be a very useful resource.
We’d like to hear what you think, so join the debate and follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter @WestfieldHealth.