Mandy Kendrick, HR Manager at Hunter Safety Solutions, talks to SHP about how the introduction of several initiatives within the business, aimed to improve mental health and wellbeing of staff, has led to an increase in engagement throughout the company.
Mandy Kendrick
Hunter Safety Group is a health and safety company, of around 60 employees, which focusses on health and safety in the construction, manufacturing, and aviation industries. The nature of the business means most of our delivery team work away from home, often for long periods of time, visiting client sites and staying in hotels or rented accommodation. Other members of our delivery team visit different sites every day to complete important client visits, such as audits. This means that they rarely attend Head Office, so communication is usually through email, phone calls or video calls. Due to the unconventional working patterns and the requirement to communicate remotely, we have always been aware that a focus on wellbeing is paramount to the welfare and positive mental health of our employees. Therefore, over the past 18 months we have introduced several initiatives to improve mental health and wellbeing for everyone in the company and have seen an increase in engagement throughout the company around these topics.
Changing the wellbeing culture
The delivery teams fed back to the management team that they needed more communication with Head Office to continue to feel part of the Hunter team. They also felt that the operations managers needed to provide more support for their wellbeing needs.
One of our main challenges was how we could involve the whole team in wellbeing initiatives. With such varied work routines and types of work, we needed to find the best way to reach everyone effectively and give everyone a voice. There were many factors that we had to consider when trying to change our wellbeing culture and we wanted to be completely inclusive with what we planned to implement.
A further challenge we faced was engagement from the team. We initially found that some were a little wary about speaking negatively about the company or suggesting ways we needed to improve.
Wellbeing Committee
Following the groundwork from Directors and senior managers we developed a Wellbeing Committee within the company. This committee is chaired by me and attended by volunteer employees who are now our ‘Wellbeing Champions’. Our Wellbeing Champions are not only ambassadors for the committee, but they also represent an assigned group of employees who feed back into a monthly Wellbeing Committee meeting from their wider group of employees. The committee had an immediate positive impact on employee-to-employee communication, as the Wellbeing Champions needed to communicate with people in their Groups who they may not usually have contact with in the course of their daily work (different specialties/departments). This enabled them to build relationships through involvement in the committee. This alone improved communication and relationship-building within the company.
Understanding that Wellbeing is not ‘one size fits all’, the first action championed by the Wellbeing Committee was to send out an anonymous questionnaire to all employees to understand what our employees felt the company did well for wellbeing and what it could improve on. The questionnaire focussed on three main areas: mental health wellbeing, physical health wellbeing and social wellbeing.
The committee decided to research the suggestions made through the questionnaire, considering budget and resourcing factors, and agreed that if one improvement from each sub-topic was achieved, it would be a positive outcome for both the committee and the company.
‘Keep in touch’
One of the initiatives that the committee implemented was ‘keep in touch’ (KIT) calls, where every member of the delivery team is contacted once per week either by phone, video call or in person and they have the chance to talk with one of our senior managers about how their work and life is going. This gives them an opportunity to broach any issues they might have and gives head office time to resolve any concerns quickly and efficiently. These KIT calls were in addition to existing regular communication and helped provide more structure to conversations between employees and their line managers.
The committee has made a huge amount of progress in a short space of time. Improvements and initiatives that have been championed by the committee include:
Improved communication
Continued monitoring of wellbeing and how this is affecting employee mental health, work-life balance and job satisfaction is at the core of how the wellbeing committee will progress various schemes within the company. The wellbeing questionnaire will become a bi-annual initiative allowing the committee to understand the priorities of the workforce and the continued communication between representatives, and their groups will support in monitoring both individual wellbeing and the wellbeing culture within Hunter.
We have improved communication across the business by introducing new members of staff via Hunter’s LinkedIn page, as well as a company-wide WhatsApp group called ‘Hunter Happenings,’ which has really helped our current employees know who is working at Head Office and who to contact regarding various operational matters. We also use LinkedIn and Hunter Happenings to celebrate the birthdays and work anniversaries for all our staff, giving an extra special focus on significant birthdays and work anniversaries of two, five and 10 years. Further celebration was given to significant work anniversaries by awarding additional holiday for specific milestones.
The Hunter Wellbeing Committee is now well established and will continue with the same focus for 2022. It is our aim to continue the committee structure and draw from last years’ experience to develop even more positive changes for our employee wellbeing.
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
