Why summer is a great time to review your wellbeing approach

It’s that time of year when people’s thoughts turn to beaches, suntan lotion, strawberries and cream; those summer feel-good factors.

This makes August a great time to look at your organisation’s approach to wellbeing and make sure you are doing everything you can to keep your employees feeling happy, healthy and engaged at work.

Here are a few thoughts around four areas I feel are really important:

1) Physical wellbeing

Providing your employees, especially those who are office-based, with access to a variety of health and fitness benefits, is a great way of showing that you care about their wellbeing.

These range from cost-effective gym memberships and sports classes, to activity-tracking devices like Fitbit. These gadgets are already changing behaviour in our own organisation, with people deliberately going out for a walk during their lunch break to make sure they hit their daily target of steps (For us it is around 4000 steps if we walk across to M&S!).

Cycling is growing in popularity, and for those employees who take advantage of a cycle-to-work scheme, and those who don’t but might be interested, this is a perfect time of year to create an event.

One event I recently attended was a cycle-to-work day, where in exchange for cycling to work, staff could get their bikes checked out by a mechanic. While the company provided a healthy and nutritious breakfast staff were invited to speak with a local cycle shop or one of the national chains to see what they could offer.

2) Mental resilience

Carrying out an employee survey is a good way of seeing what is going on within your organisation and uncovering any mental resilience hotspots.

Results often highlight the issue of work-life balance, with varying levels of happiness and of how comfortable people are with their current work-life balance across different parts of the organisation.

A survey is a great starting point, but you need to think about some of the simple things you can do to improve mental resilience, for example, providing people with quieter places to take their lunch, do some work, or simply have a moment to reflect. We’ve created some break out spaces, and reconfigured our office to create a few quieter areas.

Another really important step is to implement and promote an Employee Assistance Programme, which are proven to not only support employees through times of stress and trauma in their personal lives, but also facilitate a swifter and more effective return to work following absence. If you don’t have one, speak to your benefits provider about putting an EAP in place.

3) Financial wellness

A recent report by Neyber suggested that almost two thirds of employees say they have borrowed money in the last year to meet their basic financial needs. Financial worries can and do affect employees of all ages whether it is retirement savings, mortgage payments or short term bills, and it can impact on their lives and affect performance at work.

There is a clear distinction between helping employees with specific financial issues and formal financial advice, but within the remit of providing financial guidance employers have a number of options. These include paying for an independent financial adviser to deliver a group seminar at work, where staff can get expert information about savings, mortgages, pensions, and other aspects of their personal finance.

We are also seeing more companies like Neyber and Salary Finance coming in with fair value loan products, and making an impact in the benefits space. With employers offering a payroll slot for the loan to be repaid, employees have access to loans at a much lower rate than they find on the high street.

The majority of these loans being made by these organisations are for debt consolidation; so providing access to a fair value loan can be a huge help to employees with credit card or store card debt that would otherwise take them a long time to pay off.

4) Being Happy

The final, and many would say, most important, area of employee wellbeing, given the time of year, is being happy. The link between happiness and productivity was made abundantly clear in the 2014 University of Warwick research, which found that happiness makes people around 12% more productive.

With that in mind, you need to look at what you can do to make the workplace a happier environment, and your employees happier. Making things available to your staff via a simple and easy to use employee services platform is one.

Another is offering them things that have a low or zero cost but make a huge impact on happiness. It could be something as simple as a holiday buying scheme, where employees have the option of taking a little extra time off, all the way through to promoting discounted shopping and the use of holiday programmes within the voluntary benefits.

Make sure that your wellbeing strategy covers the points above, but don’t forget that potentially the most important aspect of employee wellbeing is being happy. If your employees are happy, they will be engaged and more productive, and that to me is the most genuine win-win.

David Walker is chief commercial officer at Personal Group.

This article was provided by Personal Group.