Akzonobel's Golden Highway To Health

At AkzoNobel, we pride ourselves on providing good, sustainable jobs for good people within the communities we serve. Although we are in the business of paint, we also endeavour to create a fun and friendly peoplefocused working environment that our employees enjoy coming to every day.

It’s a simple fact that without our people, we wouldn’t be able to make our paint, so it is of the utmost importance to us to ensure the mental and physical health and wellbeing of all of our staff across our manufacturing units. Since we opened the doors of our new facility in Ashington, we have actively promoted healthy living to the staff in a number of different ways, through healthy eating incentives, exercise-led activities and even weight-loss challenges. Our dedication has seen the site recognised by the North East Better Health at Work initiative which awarded us Silver level status in 2016, but this year, we’re going for Gold! As part of our work to achieve Gold status, we devised the ‘Highway to Health’ campaign which saw employees sign up to take part in a number of individual and team-based challenges throughout the year. As an extension of this, last month, a team of eight staff from AkzoNobel took part in the ‘Fell ’em Doon Woodland 10km’, a timed fun-run through the Friends of Ashington Community Woods in Northumberland. AkzoNobel provided water to all 250 runners at the event, which was organised by Ashington Hirst Running Club. This meant they could stay well hydrated on the warm July evening by picking up a bottle of water at the mid-way water station, at the end of the 10km track and another bottle to take home as part of the goodie bag presented to all the runners at the finish line. Jeff Hope, Head of Manufacturing Unit at AkzoNobel Ashington, said: “We were proud to sponsor the water at this year’s Fell ’em Doon Woodland 10km run in Ashington. Health and wellbeing is extremely important to AkzoNobel and we place a great emphasis as an employer on maintaining a safe and engaging work environment and ensuring that all of our staff are looked out for. “Engaging employees in activities such as the Woodland 10km is a great way to engage the team in health and wellbeing initiatives whilst also supporting the local community. The Fell ’em Doon Woodland 10km was a great event and I very much look forward to the next one!”