The feedback from yesterday’s 70-minute session in Belfast yesterday has been excellent. Attendees loved listening to the real lived experience of Hughes Insurance (part of the Liberty Global Group) and Version 1 as they explained the impact of using the Healthy Place to Work Framework to drive organisational performance. Ex BBC presenter Sarah Travers was very skilled at moving through the many topics and uncovering nuggets of information. Hopefully, the session will inspire many of the near 100 participants to start their own journey. Sarah Balmforth took the opportunity to proudly announce that Hughes Insurance had reached the standard and are now officially a Healthy Place to Work. While she acknowledged that they were delighted with that achievement, she highlighted the valuable information it provided. While she said they constantly listen to staff they were still surprised at some of the insights the tool uncovered particularly the effect the pandemic was having on their under 25 year old staff cohort.
“Our productivity went up, our sickness levels went down and we had our most successful year ever because we invested in the security, safety and health and wellbeing of our people” – Sarah Balmforth
For Lorna McAdoo and Version 1 who are entering their fourth year on the journey, it allowed them to move from an ad hoc, event-based, programmatic wellness approach to a more strategic, integrated and organisational wide approach. It also allows them to benchmark their locations in India, UK and Ireland which allows them to take a more strategic approach to drive performance through their employees. In terms of measuring the impact of being a Healthy Place to Work Lorna McAdoo focused on the effect it has on customer satisfaction statistics – the healthier and happy employees are the better the overall client experience. Lorna also highlighted the amazing fact that with all the uncertainty that the pandemic has brought their people to feel more secure today than they did in 2017!
Our thanks to the Northern Ireland Chamber for inviting us to present and great to see we have a shared ambition of making Northern Ireland as a whole a Healthy Place to Work.