When was the last time you asked your employees the simple question: “Are you happy?”
Personal Group, which aims to help UK businesses improve productivity through better engagement, says it was built on one simple fact: Happy people are more productive.
There’s no denying that health and wellbeing can have huge impacts on day-to-day life. Therefore, ensuring employee wellbeing and wellness plans are considered should be a high priority for any operator.
So, how can a company ensure those within it are happy?
Emotional wellbeing
Research released by the British Red Cross earlier this month revealed that more than half of people working in the transport and logistics sector feel always, often or sometimes lonely.
Mind says that one in four adults in the UK suffer from a diagnosable mental health problem each year.
Deteriorated emotional wellbeing can add just as much strain on an employee as poor physical health.
Heal and Safety Executive (HSE) says: “Whether work is causing the health issue or aggravating it, employers have a legal responsibility to help their employees.
“Work-related mental health issues must to be assessed to measure the levels of risk to staff. Where a risk is identified, steps must be taken to remove it or reduce it as far as reasonably practicable.”
One way that this can be done is to offer staff Personal Group’s Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP). With this, it is possible to offer confidential support to staff when they need it most.
Personal Group says: “Our EAP supports employees with emotional, personal, financial, legal, marital, family, tax, work and management issues.
“The service is available 24/7 throughout the year by phone, email, SMS or fax, connecting your employees to senior in-house specialists to deal with all EAP needs.”
It also offers a range of benefits including: Financial wellbeing, health checks and lifestyle advice.
Personal Group also offers its Hapi Hub, a cloud-based management information tool. It gives you the ability to see what your employees are doing in real-time, which benefits are most engaging and which employee services are most in demand.
Physical wellbeing
It’s a fact that promoting good physical health and wellbeing among employees can increase efficiency.
Making investments that ensure employees are in good physical health can reduce levels of sickness, increase energy levels and boost levels of concentration.
Personal Group says: “Great companies are now reviewing an ‘on-demand GP’ service.” This could help the workforce stay in good health, as the average wait to see a GP in the UK is two weeks. That could mean a member of staff being off work until they feel better, or until they have seen a doctor.
Wellbeing programmes don’t need to be expensive investments that requires staff to have time away from work.
Stagecoach was the first transport company to introduce nationwide staff wellness scheme. It invested in a home-based wellbeing programme, #DrivingFitnessTogether, which aims to help the operator’s staff improve their physical and emotional health through a series of videos covering physical workouts as well as other aspects of wellbeing including nutrition, hydration, stress management, goal setting, confidence and sleep management.
Speaking about the initiative, Stagecoach UK Bus MD for England and Wales, Mark Threapleton, says: “The wellbeing of our staff is hugely important. We all spend a large part of our lives at work so it’s important that we support each other and look after our health.
“This initiative is another example of the innovative steps we are taking around wellbeing and we hope employees will make the most of this fantastic opportunity to find out more about how to stay healthy and happy.”
Staff benefits
Another way to help provide the foundations to positive employee health and wellness is by offering financial peace of mind.
The Transport Benevolent Fund (TBF) is a service that provides its members with a range of benefits when they find “things are not going so well.”
TBF explains that members contribute £1 a week and then all benefits are available not only to the member, but also to their partner and any dependent children.
Where staff have contributed for long enough, they gain free membership in retirement.
TBF benefits include: Prescription prepayment certificates, therapies, laser eyesight correction, medical equipment, medical consultations, scans and tests and many others.
There are many ways to ensure your staff are happy when they are at work. Being able to offer employee perks that enhances personal health and wellbeing is invaluable, but so is providing and open and honest working environment, encouraging people to talk, and simply asking them: “Are you ok?”
With one in six British workers affected by conditions such as anxiety, depression and stress every year, mental health awareness needs to be raised in most industries, not least the passenger transport industry.
Despite these statistics, there is undoubtedly a stigma attached to the term and people tend to avoid talking about it.
Since research hints that there's a link between employees' happiness and their productivity at work, it’s in employees’ best interests to support the wellbeing of their staff.
Offering schemes such as Personal Group’s employee engagement platform or financial peace of mind with TBF are just a couple of ways to do this. It shows you are prepared to invest in your staff’s health and that you are a business willing to talk about mental health and personal wellbeing.
By changing viewpoints in the workplace, people will begin to feel comfortable about being open and honest and it will eventually take the stigma out of something that affects us all – mental health.
This is an issue that can only be tackled if people are willing to talk about it.
Time to Talk Day
Why not take part in Time to Talk Day on 7 February? Organised by Time to Change – a movement that exists to change how people think and act about mental health problems – the day is “about bringing together the right ingredients, to have a conversation about mental health,” says the organisation.
