Having a happy, healthy workforce is key to high productivity, reduced absence and low staff turnover. But how can you create a positive wellbeing culture in your business, especially with the rise in remote working?

We’re living through difficult times for our collective mental health. The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic linger on and we now have a cost of living crisis to cope with as well. More of us than ever before are working from home or remotely, which can bring isolation and low team morale. It is a truly challenging time for employers and HR professionals to face - so it is more important than ever that workers’ wellbeing is taken seriously.

The World Health Organization estimates that “12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety”. In the UK, this can incur a cost to businesses of up to £56 billion (Deloitte, 2022). Poor mental health leads to lower productivity, increased absences and more frequent resignations, which in turn negatively affects a business’s bottom line. Conversely, “investing in employee wellbeing can lead to increased resilience, better employee engagement, reduced sickness absence and higher performance and productivity” (CIPD).

It's clear that a happy, supported and healthy workforce is good for business. But how can employers make a meaningful difference to staff wellbeing, especially if not everyone is working in the same office?

At Lifelink, we’ve created three new services to address this:

Wellbeing Education

These can be delivered in-person (across the central belt of Scotland) or via video (across the UK) and focus on building resilience and teaching self-care techniques to improve staff wellbeing. Topics include coping with change, improving motivation and reassessing stress, but we can also create bespoke sessions to deal with something specific such as grief in the workplace, approaching retirement or handling redundancies.

Wellbeing Supervision

Some employees may be more vulnerable to poor mental health due to their job roles. For example, they may have to support others through trauma, deal with angry customers, face hard decisions or witness grief on a regular basis. These workers may need one-to-one support above and beyond our counselling service, to be able to check-in with a mental health supervisor on a frequent basis to offload and reduce compassion fatigue. The Lifelink wellbeing supervision programme is based on our own model of employee support, because all counsellors need this kind of supervision to alleviate the emotional stress of their clients’ cases – and do their jobs effectively.

Employee Counselling

This is available via phone or video, so employees can access it whether they’re working from home or in an office. Being able to explore thoughts, feelings and worries in a safe, confidential and non-judgemental space is invaluable to improving people’s wellbeing – but with long NHS waiting times and expensive private fees, not everyone can access such a service when they need it. Having a qualified counsellor to talk to, separate from the company, can make a massive difference to employee mental health.

If you are keen to build a happier, healthier wellbeing culture in your business, fill out our business enquiry form and an adviser will be in touch to discuss your bespoke needs.