Our Wellbeing Plan for 2022

The New Year is always a great time for reflection on the past year and planning for the future.

This month we are excited to launch our PEMCO Wellbeing Action Plan, something we are super passionate about.

Why it matters to PEMCO

Whilst most of us have positive mental health and wellbeing most of the time, our mental health can change. There may be times when we are ‘thriving’, times when we start to struggle, and times when we develop a diagnosable mental health condition. 1 in 6 UK workers are currently experiencing a mental health condition, and 1 in 4 workers will have some form of mental health condition in any one year.

So at any given time, we might have 15% of employees who are experiencing a mental health condition such as anxiety, depression, or feeling the effects of stress. These conditions might last a long or a short time or they might come and go. And just as we help our employees to keep physically well and support them through physical illness or disability, we undertake to do the same with respect to mental health and wellbeing. We aim to help all employees keep mentally well and to support them through periods of poor mental health whether they remain at work or take time off.

How it fits with PEMCO’s values:

Employee Wellbeing is particularly important to PEMCO because it aligns with our values of being an inclusive employer, being invested in our team, and approaching all endeavours with integrity. We value our employees and believe that each employee plays an important part in contributing to our goals.

Benefits for PEMCO

Fitter, happier employees are generally found to be more resilient and able to deal with change. Furthermore, workforce wellbeing helps to support sustainable organisational performance by:

• Increasing employee engagement
• Reducing absenteeism
• Reducing employee turnover
• Reducing presenteeism
• Improving efficiency and productivity
• Improving morale

Benefits for PEMCO’s People

Improved workforce wellbeing enables employees to:

• Be better able to manage the conflicting demands of home and work life
• Feel less stressed
• Have greater job satisfaction
• Have higher self-esteem and a sense of wellbeing
• Have improved morale, and ultimately, to live longer.

What’s in our plan?

We chose to use The Five Ways to Wellbeing framework to inform our Wellbeing Action Plan. The Five Ways to Wellbeing are a set of evidence-based public mental health messages aimed at improving the mental health and wellbeing of the whole population. They were developed by the New Economics Foundation as the result of a commission by Foresight, the UK government’s futures think-tank, as part of the Foresight Project on Mental Capital and Wellbeing.

They include the following ‘Ways’:

• Connect
• Be Active
• Take Notice
• Keep Learning
• Give

(Watch this space for a detailed blog on this next month!)

Some examples of our activities are monthly team lunches (Connect), stand up meetings (Be Active), creating a green space for the team to enjoy (Take Notice), a book club (Keep Learning) and free annual leave over Xmas (Give).

Tips for creating your own wellbeing action plan

• Ensure it meets staff needs – before you develop your Wellbeing Action Plan it’s important to consult with your employees and identify their wellbeing needs. We conducted a Health Needs Assessment (a questionnaire to gather data on wellbeing needs) first, as this told us what our team needed help with, and what interventions employees were keen to engage with.
• Make sure your interventions are realistic and appealing. E.g., It may be more successful to do a team step challenge than an Iron Man event!
• But will it actually work? Make sure you include measures of success – think about ‘hard measures’ such as reduced sickness absence rates, and also ‘soft measures’ such as improved employee engagement. It’s important to measure the success of each aspect of the action plan so you can use the data to inform your action plan for the following year (i.e., what worked and what didn’t?)