Effective Employee Wellbeing Management

Effective management of your employee wellbeing is essential to the health of your staff and will help keep your business healthy too. It is therefore imperative to strike the right balance between mitigating the risks that you need to manage and costs.

Many companies focus their efforts and budget on putting effective policies in place to support their employees' wellbeing. This can be expensive and is only likely to become increasingly so over the long term as people live longer, expensive treatments are becoming more common and the working population is getting older.

Some Key Facts
● Employees with high levels of wellness are 35% more attached to the companies they work for¹

● Absenteeism and presenteeism (being at work when you aren't well) costs the UK economy £57 billion annually in lost productivity - that equates to around 30 days per employee each year, according to the 2017 "Britain's Healthiest Workplace" report

● Research shows that productivity in the UK is 17% lower than the G7 average and that employees listed high workloads, financial worries, guilt and concerns about job security as some of the reasons why they wouldn't take time off even if they were feeling unwell²

● Mental health is still a huge issue in the workplace with 61% of managers responding 'Yes' when asked if they felt their employees mental health was being overlooked³

Treating the Employee as a Whole and Creating a Wellness Culture in the Workplace
Employers are seeing increased results when combining their employee benefits and workplace health strategies in a holistic approach to employee wellbeing --. Through proactively working with employees there is generally a direct knock-on effect to productivity, happiness and health within the workplace.

● Prevention, Intervention and Protection are key areas to consider to maximise the physical wellbeing of your employees
● Prevention – Identify potential problems and take action to stop issues arising
● Intervention – Take prompt action to prevent problems affecting employees and your business
● Protection – Put adequate policies in place to support your staff as quickly as possible and understand exactly what is included and make this available to them

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have published a set of management standards as a guide for companies to design healthy working environments. Incorporating these elements in your company health policies and management training is a great step towards creating a culture of wellness in your organisation. These include:

● Demands – this looks at workload, work patterns and work environment
● Control – how much say the person has in the way they do their work
● Support – including encouragement, sponsorship and resources provided by the organisation, line management and colleagues
● Relationships – including promoting positive working to avoid conflict and dealing with unacceptable behaviour
● Role – people understand their role within the organisation and the organisation ensures that they do not have conflicting roles
● Change – how organisational change is managed and communicated in the workplace

Steps to Designing a Wellness Strategy
To support portfolio companies with wellbeing programmes, PEPCO partners with Jelf who are a specialist in the field. They support organisations to design tailored wellness strategies and programmes along with supporting the delivery of key private medical insurance and pensions provisions.

When discussing wellbeing with companies Jelf say they often find there is the need for external support to develop a programme that fits the business, whilst putting in the central systems and processes to allow self-management by employees and employers. Key areas they look at are:

● Data analysis to determine key requirements
● Review policies and make them relevant
● Create a strategy that suits your business
● Promote and provide easy access
● Lead by example

PEPCO have access to a dedicated team of advisers from Jelf who can support you with a review of health needs across your business, and also facilitate access to our group discounts on private medical insurance.

For further information on this or any other areas where we can help please contact Mark Russell: 0203 008 7585 or mark.russell@pepcoservices.com.

¹ Altmann R. A new vision for older workers: retain, retrain, recruit, 2015
² Office for National Statistics
3 The Mental Health at Work Report 2017

www.jelf.com
Jelf18.0229