Your Job Can Be Good For You: Costain

• Health and Wellbeing
• Healthy_Communities

Achieving parity between physical and mental health and safety

What Costain did

Costain continues to address mental health as a key workplace consideration. It does this by normalising important conversations through day-to-day management and leadership behaviours. In addition to this, Costain’s Wellbeing Steering Group has instigated and developed a group-wide Wellbeing Network to support both physical and mental health, to help everyone to be at their best, and to create a trusting and psychologically safe working environment.

The benefit for Costain’s business

Using colleague feedback and ongoing employee health conversations, Costain engaged with all Mental Health First Aiders and Wellbeing Champions to understand its current business needs, and to strike the right balance between physical health, mental health, and its wider wellbeing focus. Costain ran a dedicated and group-wide ‘Leadership Impact Day’ to engage the workforce and other stakeholders. Colleagues shared how they would like to have greater influence on their job role including job design, workplace and environment design, and wellbeing input. This included how they viewed parity between physical and mental health and safety.

“Employees feel more engaged and empowered to control their own role.”

The benefit for Costain colleagues

Costain now has a more structured approach to communications, a demonstrable support network for those supporting the wider workforce, and a structure that allows it to communicate on both physical and mental health in a coordinated way with equality in messaging, feedback, and engagement.

How Costain used Business in the Community’s Workwell Model

Business in the Community’s (BITC) Workwell Model brings together five enablers that support ways of working which drive long term wellbeing. It also has four organisational values to operationalise ‘better’ work, underpinned by sustainability.

Costain has applied all five of the enablers to inform its approach, recognising that each one directly relates to another. When underpinned by the company’s behavioural approach in all it does, these enablers have driven Costain’s step change. Costain is focused on developing leading indicators, along with lagging indicators, to continue this drive, measure its successes, and identify further opportunities.

The four values mirror it’s business as usual approach. The firm believes that psychological safety is key to creating a healthy environment for its workforce and relies on effective relationships based on trust. Its leadership and line management approach are both focused on demonstrating authentic, compassionate, and empathetic behaviours ensuring that everyone feels valued and included. Each of the values is an essential consideration in developing an approach to achieve parity, backed up by leading behaviours.

“Costain now has a structure to communicate on both physical and mental health in a coordinated way with equality in messaging, feedback and engagement.”

Your job can be good for you

Your Job Can be Good for you report sets how businesses can revolutionise the way employees work while supporting broader responsible business goals. The report includes recommendations that businesses should take to begin their post-pandemic re-set of their employee wellbeing agenda.  

Next steps

• Download the Your Job Can Be Good For You report
• Register your interest in being part of the wellbeing at work revolution
• Read more Your Job Can Be Good For You case studies.
• If you are a BITC member, contact your Relationship Manager to discuss the support we can give you to create a workplace that is good for your employees. Log in to MyBITC to find their details.
• If you are not a BITC member, contact our Advisory Team to learn how BITC’s Wellbeing Advisers can support your organisation to develop and implement effective health and wellbeing strategies.

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