The Thrive at Work: Health and Wellbeing Awards are the West Midlands standard of good practice and a quality mark for workplace health and wellbeing. Everyone who joins must initially achieve the Foundation Level before gaining access to progress further and obtain certification for Bronze, Silver, and Gold Levels.
This fully funded program from Coventry County Council offers guidance for implementing positive changes to enhance workplace health and wellbeing.
Thrive at Work provides an accreditation for organisations like Risk Evolves that are committed to improving health and wellbeing for their staff. This is available to all sectors and suitable for anyone who employs five staff or more.
Why did Risk Evolves Register?
Our team are the most important element of the organisation and far more than just a resource. We always knew that health and wellbeing was at the core of the business, but we wanted to ensure that Risk Evolves is a great place to work and that our staff feel the same way too.
At the very core of why our MD wanted to create their own business was to get away from the corporate stereotypes of ‘profit first’ and build a successful business around the mindset of ‘people first’. This has already proven to work for us and enforce the ‘happy team is a productive team’ sentiment.
We want our team to feel valued and looked after and a great way to do this is to gain external accreditation. This is not only a good way to get a fresh pair of eyes on our health and wellbeing efforts, but allows us to champion the benefits of looking after your staff and influence other organisations to better themselves too.
Key Outcomes
To become accredited would take resources, so what did we hope to achieve from this as a business? At the top of the list was happy, healthy employees. We knew that this would not always be achievable so at the very least, we hoped that our changes and improvements would create a workplace that doesn’t contribute to poor health and wellbeing with a focus on always aiming higher.
We also wanted to come away with tools that help with the following:
- Understanding the status of health & wellbeing of our employees
- Understanding the needs of health & wellbeing of our employees
- Understanding what we can change and improve for the benefit of our employees
- Creating initiatives and campaigns that provide health and wellbeing awareness
- Understanding how we can bring the team closer together
- Injecting fun where possible and appropriate
Did We Achieve Our Goals?
As an early Christmas present, we gained our accreditation and certificate for the Foundation Level in December 2023!
Along our journey we have learnt the importance of understanding our employees; Allowing them an opportunity and a portal to express their opinion, showing us how our operations affect their health and wellbeing. Without carrying out anonymous surveys, we found that some employees would not have come forward with their challenges and ideas, meaning some issues would have gone unactioned.
The following outlines the transformative adjustments and enhancements made in response to the challenges and ideas that served as catalysts for change within our management systems, policy, and team awareness:
- We refined our HR Handbook to better define and clarify Flexible Working hours so staff could do wellbeing activities such as fitness during the working hours
- We increased the number of Mental Health First Aiders we have which naturally broadened the array of backgrounds and experience we could draw upon too
- The buzz of the new Mental Health First Aiders in the team has given us the confidence to talk more freely about our own health and wellbeing challenges
- It has also given us all a better understanding of these challenges and realised we are not alone!
- We have increased our employee benefits program to include more health and wellbeing options such as mental health consultancy
- We have started new team bonding initiatives like the Conqueror Challenges that allow us to work together on something that is fun and good for our health. These are no pressure, and non-mandatory, but still count as a whole-team-effort, when we complete a challenge. We believe that if one person is running for an hour, there's another who is working hard for a client to allow this to happen – We are all doing our bit!
The ultimate goal at Risk Evolves is to continue improving ourselves and be a role model for other organisations; To show that business success and employee welfare go hand in hand.
We are proud of our achievements so far but understand that the Foundation Level is only the start. We value what we have learnt from the experience, and are excited to continue our Thrive journey into the future.
Want To Get Involved?
If your business is in the West Midlands area and you are interested in gaining a Thrive at Work Health & Wellbeing accreditation, please follow this link for more information.
