Emotional wellbeing plays a key role in creating healthy workforces

Two years ago, we made the decision to focus our attention and resources in one key area – mental health. We signed the Time to Change pledge, created an action plan that focused on tackling the stigma still associated with mental health and started training our own people as Mental Health First Aiders (MHFAs).

In just two years we had trained more than 130 MHFAs. That sparked a positive organisational conversation that led to breaking down barriers and our people starting to realise there is no shame in having a conversation about mental health.

What’s really helped drive our plan is the huge amount of support and investment we’ve received from our Executive Board (EB) and leaders, with two EB members and a number of our leaders trained as MHFAs.

We expanded our training and awareness programme to include stress and anxiety, self-compassion and resilience sessions run by Dorset MIND. We also started delivering breakfast sessions on mental health for our frontline teams and training days for our leaders.

In January this year, we took wellbeing on tour across all our offices to launch our new wellbeing offer. Under this, we have broadened mental health to include social wellbeing under the banner ‘Emotional Wellbeing’ and introduced two new strands: ‘Physical Wellbeing’ and ‘Financial Wellbeing’.

The importance of building social ties should not be underestimated and can be a major factor in how well we feel emotionally. Ensuring our people feel connected and well is a huge part of our culture, so we actively look for opportunities to help facilitate this through initiatives like our 10K step challenges, charity fundraising activities, meet-and-eats and volunteering days.

Although the health and wellbeing of our people has always been a priority for us, the current COVID-19 pandemic has seen us ramp up our work on this.

We realised that with the majority of our people working from home and some employees on furlough, it was crucial to try and maintain a sense of togetherness.

We quickly created a “Keeping well and feeling connected” programme, switching classroom-based mental health training to virtual sessions, live streaming mindfulness sessions and hosting fun virtual quizzes, not just for our employees but their families too.

We’ve generated new digital wellbeing channels to encourage our teams to continue to socialise, collaborate and feel connected. From a digital book club and a gardeners’ channel to a sleep hub, the channels have been well received. We also launched a parent zone on our intranet to support those balancing caring commitments at home with workload, and we worked with Dorset MIND to host webinars on looking after young children during the pandemic and dealing with anxiety during this time.

We have worked with our MHFAs to roll out our Furlough Buddy Programme, which provides weekly wellbeing calls to furloughed employees until we are able to welcome them back to work.

Our commitment to our people’s emotional and physical wellbeing is only strengthening, and we look forward to launching our financial wellbeing programme over the next 12 months.

The author is Julie Cridland, health and wellbeing lead (employee experience) at Aster Group.

This article is featured in REBA’s Employee Wellbeing research 2020, in partnership with AXA PPP healthcare.