This week is Mental Health Awareness Week and at Saffery Champness Offshore we understand the importance of achieving good mental health. Our People and Culture Team and Wellness Champions continue to work collaboratively to create and launch wellbeing programmes to help promote the importance of employee wellbeing, as well as to encourage more open discussions around mental health in the workplace. Each programme focuses on a different theme and offers handy resources, in-house events and learning opportunities for all staff to attend, as well as occasional social get-togethers.
Since the pandemic, wellbeing has become a key part of our ethos and there has been a tremendous focus on, and investment in, health and wellbeing. This includes further enhancements to our existing flexible and agile working arrangements and we also introduced a dress for your day policy when we returned to the office after the recent lockdown. The focus on wellbeing is something that will endure well beyond the pandemic, with our HR department rebranding internally to focus on ‘People and Culture’, and working to encourage and facilitate a better work/life balance.
During the pandemic, and whilst our teams were all working from home, we held frequent team interactions and check-in’s to ensure everyone had the support that they needed which helped us understand the issues that people were facing. Each and every one of us may have faced different challenges and had a vastly different experience of lockdown. We organised a local Biscuit Box delivery to show our appreciation to our staff for all their hard work and support during these challenging times, and each team hosted a virtual coffee break as a chance to catch up and enjoy their Guernsey themed biscuits together. We’ve found that it’s doing the little things, but doing them consistently, that really matters.
This year, the Mental Health Foundation have chosen the theme of ‘Nature’ for mental health awareness week, which reflects on the positive impacts that nature can have on our mental health. During this week our Guernsey office will be connecting with nature to create an outdoor space for staff to enjoy. Later in the week, we will be visited by The Pollinator Project representatives for a talk on how they are helping to enhance Guernsey’s biodiversity, along with ways in which we can all support.
Jane Wade, Head of People and Culture commented:
“We have made a considerable amount of changes to our internal practices with regard to staff wellbeing over the past year. Not only have we rebranded our HR department to ‘People and Culture’ and launched multiple wellbeing programmes for staff, we have also reviewed our internal policies, introducing an agile working policy and a dress for your day policy. We have also reviewed our flexitime policy and are currently trialling the removal of our core hours. We believe these policy changes to be of great benefit to the wellbeing of our staff, allowing for more flexibility in the way that we work and providing the opportunity to dress in a way that reflects individual style and to encourage the “whole self” concept in the workplace. I have no doubt that we will continue to consider further changes as and when necessary to reflect our commitment to the wellbeing of our staff and the caring approach we wish to continue to emphasise within the firm’s culture”.
Helen Green, Director commented:
“Over the past year, dealing with Covid-19, we understand now more than ever the importance of mental wellbeing. In June 2020 we launched our wellbeing programme with a summer of initiatives focusing on wellbeing in the workplace and support during difficult times. This year we are running our wellbeing programme May through to July with various activities for our employees to get involved in.”
