National Health & Wellbeing Programme
This autumn will see the launch of our new national health and wellbeing programme. Formalising the tools we have in place to support our continued commitment to creating an engaging workplace and our staff in their personal and professional lives.
The aim of our Health and Wellbeing Strategy is to identify issues that our staff may face, what can be done to address them, and what outcomes we want to achieve.
Our strategy encourages individuals to work together to:
- prevent where we can
- intervene early when problems do develop
- take steps to reduce the harms arising from behaviours or actions that we cannot prevent.
We want our staff to feel valued and involved, as such we have appropriate tools and occupational health support to tackle absence, stress, early identification of issues and how to manage common problems such as mental health and musculoskeletal disorders at all levels.
Over 140 million working days are lost each year to sickness absence in the UK at a cost to employers of £9 billion a year and a cost to the state of £13 billion a year. In addition to these 1.3 million workers suffer from work-related ill-health; workplace ill-health accounts for 13,000 deaths each year. In 2016/17 stress, depression and anxiety overtook musculoskeletal disorders as the most commonly reported work-related illness. Poor health, whether or not caused or influenced by work, impacts an individual, their family, their employer and the state.
Paul Steedman, Managing Director, said; Health and Safety is a priority on all our projects, but as business it’s important to promote, encourage and remind all our staff of the support that we have in place if they need it. We believe that health and wellbeing will continue to emerge as not only a risk to be managed, but also an opportunity to boost productivity through a healthy and engaged workforce.
