Practitioner view: an employee-driven wellbeing approach is paying off

It’s not only our environments that are diverse. Depending on which parts of the employee population you look at, there are very different levels of engagement with wellbeing, and some of that reflects the fact that wellbeing in our business has traditionally been driven by health and safety factors.

But we are working towards a common approach across the company. Broadly speaking, our benefits philosophy is based around enhancing people’s lives, so we’ve introduced services such as a Know your Numbers programme, where staff can understand more about health risks such as heart and kidney disease, stroke and diabetes. They can also learn and keep tabs on risk factors such as their blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, weight and waist measurements.

We now run these sessions twice yearly across all of our sites and we’ve supplemented them with other health-related seminars and sessions. For example, as we don’t have a nine to five business, we’ve introduced a Shift Survival session, which explores how employees can look after their mental health when working shifts.

Our emphasis on creating a preventative health culture has already helped us to pick up early warning signs among some staff. We know that our staff in Aberdeen have higher blood pressure than in the rest of the business so we’ve taken remedial action around that. Ultimately, we don’t want staff to be ill but we don’t want to tell people what to do – we’d rather help them to understand for themselves that their health comes first from the choices that they make.

Our employee-driven approach is starting to take effect. We’ve seen a lot more requests from staff to put on events around mental health over the last six months. In contrast, when we tried to introduce resilience training a couple of years ago we had no take-up – I think that’s evidence of our positive direction of travel.

As a next step, we are considering healthy flexible benefits ‘pots’ for the future. We already have an online flexible benefits offering but giving individuals a pot to spend would take us even further away from a one-size-fits-all approach.

Support from the business has been really crucial to the breadth and development of our wellbeing offering and, amongst other things, has enabled us to invest in our own dedicated physiologist, run yoga sessions and have fitness days. We’ve even introduced on-site treadmills that staff can use to take a break.

And we are starting to see a return on investment. In 2017, we recorded 9,739 days off through sickness from 3,046 staff. In 2018, that fell to 2,893 days’ sickness. And although there have been changes in our headcount over that time, the general direction of these figures is positive. In the past 18 months, the business has also started to record the reasons for staff sickness rather than simply recording generic absence. That helps us to direct resources towards the causes of absence – we can’t monitor and change health if we don’t have the data to do so.

Charlotte John, UK Insured Benefits Manager, Schlumberger