Tina Samson of Molson Coors on using flexible working to get employees a better work/life balance

Molson Coors’ culture and wellbeing strategy is based on active listening. We adapt our strategy in response to what employees tell us is important to them. Our employee forum, wellbeing team and mental health champions have a big impact on what we introduce and how we ensure we adapt to the needs of our diverse workforce.

Tina Samson will be presenting a case study at the REBA Employee Wellbeing Congress. Hear session Listening, listening, listening: How Molson Coors engages its workforce in mental wellbeing strategies will take place at 11:20 on 9 September. Register to attend.

Research shows that people increasingly value working flexibly over some traditional elements of a reward package. While we already considered ourselves to be a relatively flexible employer, we didn’t really highlight this as a benefit. Our employees told us that they wanted us to do more to help balance their time between work and personal lives.

We developed our Moments that Matter programme to encourage a better balance and to recognise the ‘moments’ that mean something to each individual employee. This is part of both our diversity and inclusion (D&I) and wellbeing strategies, to ensure we attract and retain the best talent.

The first two parts of the programme focused on recognising that our people work long hours, so we wanted to help them with balance; and acknowledge that different things are important to different people. We also wanted to ensure that employees’ holidays were truly for rest and relaxation, so we introduced summer hours and Life Leave in 2019.

Summer hours gave people the flexibility to work extra hours during the week, saving them up to use as time off either as a half-day every week, or a whole day every fortnight. To encourage inclusivity, we asked employees to share pictures of how they’d spent their summer hours.

We surveyed employees afterwards asking whether they would like us to run the programme again, and how they had used it. An overwhelming number of staff valued this benefit and voted to run it again next year.

Life Leave gives employees up to two weeks’ paid leave a year, in addition to their holiday entitlement, for significant moments in their life or to meet short-term demands, such as urgent childcare that might normally have been covered by taking annual leave. We haven’t put in any hard and fast rules on how this leave can be used, it is left to the discretion of line managers. They know best what matters to their people.

We have also created a parent and carers’ group to help listen to their challenges and understand how we can best support them. Our plans remain fluid and we will develop the programme further to include other areas of our D&I strategy.

Our approach to flexibility and our embedded wellbeing strategy helped us to adapt quickly to transition a large number of employees to home working during early 2020. The support and tools we have in place, from our mental health pathway to our long-standing EAP service, our mental health app and network of mental health champions, have ensured we have been able to respond quickly to employees’ needs.

Having wellbeing embedded into our culture means that it’s now naturally the first thing we consider in our plans, and a natural part of our conversations.

The author is Tina Samson, reward program director, EMEA & APAC Molson Coors.

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