New year, a time when many of us promise to make a fresh start, adopt a healthier mind-set and look for ways to improve our mental health and wellbeing
Finder survey, Dec 2021 reported “54% of the UK population will set a New Year’s resolution in 2022 – 28 million people. A quarter of the UK will make a healthfocused resolution for 2022.”
SSCL is the largest provider of businesscritical support services to Government, Police and Defence. We pay 550,000 public sector employees each month and process billions of pounds of public sector funds.
The health and wellbeing of our people and providing a safe and healthy workplace is high on our agenda and continues to be of paramount importance. We understand the importance of supporting our colleagues and last year made our own health-focused resolutions to support our colleagues.
And we are delighted that our wellbeing programme and campaigns attracted national recognition – winning Best Coronavirus Crisis Response at the 2021 Chartered Institute for Payroll Professionals (CIPP) Awards for remaining fully operational and maintaining resilience in delivery of HR, Payroll and supplier payments. We did this whilst also ensuring the health and wellbeing of our colleagues throughout the pandemic, most of whom had been swiftly relocated to working from home. Award judges said they could not commend SSCL highly enough for the scale of operations, getting our colleagues set up at home so quickly and effectively.
SSCL also received a Highly Commended in the Best Wellbeing Initiative for Business Culture category at the Business Culture Annual Awards 2021, for the huge amount of work invested into people engagement across all our UK sites throughout the pandemic and beyond.
Our health and wellbeing campaigns have covered a range of topics, all aimed at reducing stress, supporting our people through new practices, initiatives, and technology.
Colleagues can now benefit from access to Mental Health First Aiders – a scheme that involves colleagues trained to support anyone who wants additional help. Social activity programmes – from games and quizzes to yoga and fitness classes to health and wellbeing advice – delivered through a series of campaigns, wellbeing bulletins and webinars to technology advice and employee and manager guides – we created a whole host of information, videos and bulletins.
How do we know what we did worked?
SSCL is dedicated to continual people engagement. We regularly interact with over 2,800 employees to make sure we are providing the right tools and resources to benefit their health and wellbeing. We regularly measure effectiveness via surveys, temperature checks, and employee feedback and this is something that will continue.
Feedback from surveys conducted has been superb, with 84% of colleagues letting us know that they have felt supported in their work/life balance and a further 95% informing us that we have successfully looked out for their wellbeing during COVID-19.