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19 Oct 2017
by Liz Morrell

Video tutorial: The critical role of line managers in wellbeing

The role of the line manager is critical in implementing wellbeing in organisations, according to a panel discussion held at the REBA Employee Wellbeing Congress 2017.

Watch the role of the line manager panel discussion in full

At John Lewis the company's head of wellbeing Yulia O'Mahony said happiness of its partners was key to its strategy. "Looking after the wellbeing of partners is something that is at the heart what we do," she said.

She said the company's current challenge was that the time of its line managers is stretched. She said the company encouraged a bottom up rather than top down approach to wellbeing, sharing best practise at ground level. "We are trying to encourage people to do things that are very relevant for them because our other challenge is we have very different groups of people within our 90,000 staff," she said. "The balance for us is making sure line managers have the time to do it and at the same time encouraging local initiatives."

Zoe Eccleston, health & wellbeing EMEA at Bloomberg, said it was important to understand the culture of businesses. "It's making it very specific to help those line managers," she said.

Andy Buxton, health and wellbeing manager at National Grid, said a recent restructuring of the business gave his company a good chance to reengage its staff with wellbeing. "We were able to create a combined message around the change programme and then supporting the line managers through that change process," he said.

Supporting line managers is particularly important when it comes to looking after the mental health of staff, said Stephanie Schreiber, wellbeing adviser at Business in the Community who outlined best practise guidelines that organisations can adopt in the session. "In order to really get traction on the mental health agenda there's clearly a need to engage and support line managers on that," she said.

This video tutorial was recorded at the REBA Employee Wellbeing Congress 2017 which took place on 22 June 2017.

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