Employee wellness an ‘epic issue’ for businesses of all sizes

Employee health and wellbeing was the hot topic at Business in the Community’s (BITC’s) second Health and Work Summit, held at The King’s Fund in London on Tuesday 11 May.

The health and wellbeing of employees is mission critical to the ongoing recovery of the UK

Nearly 200 delegates, who came from the full spectrum of business sectors and sizes, heard from leading business and academic experts about how a strategic focus on this important subject can bring dividends. The event was chaired by Noel O’Reilly, Senior Editor of Personnel Today and XpertHR.

“Mission critical”

Louise Aston, Director, Business Action on Health at BITC, addressed the audience about the need for wellbeing to be fully integrated into the core of the business and maximising employee wellbeing through engagement. She said: “The health and wellbeing of employees is mission critical to the ongoing recovery of the UK.”

This was followed by a rousing and thought-provoking run through the academic evidence behind investing in health and wellbeing from Professor Cary Cooper of Lancaster University. He predicted that presenteeism – whereby staff are at work but are unwell or disengaged – would become a bigger cost as businesses look to downsize because of the recession. He also warned against employing line managers purely because they were technically good at their jobs, saying that social and personal skills and management ability should be regarded equally important during the recruitment process.

Who’s doing what, and how are they doing it?

Case studies of employee health and wellbeing programmes that are really returning on their investments were presented by Alan Walters, Unilever’s HR Director for the UK & Ireland, Fiona Dawson, Managing Director of Mars Chocolate UK, Tanith Dodge, Director of HR, Marks & Spencer and Henry Stewart, Chief Executive of Happy Computers, who gave the small business perspective.

Unilever’s ‘Fit Business’ programmes found most success when they were taken directly to employees, such as health checks in the workplace and heart age calculators for staff to help them begin to make differences to their lifestyles. Using employee ambassadors, ensuring board-level representatives took part and keeping initiatives simple really helped the campaigns take root.

Fiona Dawson’s experience at Mars has been to make employee health programmes accessible and non-threatening to enable maximum engagement across the business, while ensuring that communication around initiatives was done in a variety of ways to avoid it becoming “like wallpaper”. She said “engaged associates are healthy associates”, which helps to drive the business forward. Her five tips for success included great line management; flexible working policies; a supportive culture; communication and promotion; processes to identify and address issues. Dawson concluded that board reporting had helped the company to visualise the impact that wellbeing was having on business success.

Tanith Dodge spoke about the latest initiative launched under the Plan A banner on 6 May. Called ‘The Way to Health and Wellbeing’ the online wellness tool is open to all staff and encourages them to make pledges for small changes they can make. In just one week it received 1,500 pledges – an amazing figure for an engagement programme where a large number of employees can only access the internet from home during their spare time. Louise Aston commented that this shows there is a “real appetite for this kind of initiative when introduced in the right way.”

Happy Computer’s Henry Stewart made the case for the small business. With only 35 employees and a waiting list of over 2,000 people wanting to work for them the company is clearly doing something right. Low staff turnover can be partly attributed to their policy around line management – employees can choose their own - and that management roles are grouped into two categories of equal standing – those who excel at strategy and decision making and those who stand out for supporting and  nurturing other employees.

Stewart’s tips to SMEs were that wellness initiatives do not need to cost the earth, and that office culture and how you treat people has a huge part to play in employee wellbeing. There are also lots of completely free resources to help SMEs help their employees, such as the Citizens Advice Bureau, the British Heart Foundation, and the government’s Health, Work and Well-being initiative which has a free helpline.

And the investor perspective?

For those needing to provide a more robust business case to their board, shareholders and prospective investors, Julie McDowell, Head of Socially Responsible Investment at Standard Life Investments gave her perspective on how businesses are reporting on their employee health and wellbeing. She said that whilst there was evidence of increased reporting on health topics and quantitative indicators, that there was little evidence of integrated strategic management of the agenda as a whole. McDowell stressed that, on a very fundamental level, businesses cannot operate without the efforts of its people. And therefore what investors want to see is that business are managing people in a way that will drive business growth and productivity.

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