Supermarket retail organisation Tesco has partnered with three UK health charities in order to develop a new workplace health programme for its 300,000 UK employees.
Its ‘Little helps for healthier living’ partnership, which launched on 9 January 2018, will see Tesco liaise with the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, and Diabetes UK. The partnership has been designed to help the organisation understand what more it needs to do to support employees with their overall health and how it can remove the barriers to healthy habits.
The five-year partnership will include research projects and policy development, which will aid in the creation of a new workplace health programme that will be rolled out to all employees in the UK. The partnership will aim to encourage and support sustainable, measurable changes in behaviour using a series of activities and campaigns targeted at reducing the risk of heart and circulatory disease, cancer and type two diabetes.
This year, the focus on workplace health follows on from a series of four month-long campaigns that Tesco ran in 2017, around the pillars of nutrition, healthy body, and healthy mind. As part of these campaigns, Tesco has provided its UK employees with 10.5 million pieces of free fruit, 310,000 water bottles and snack boxes, health-based pay day deals and discounts, free health checks, and 7,000 blood pressure and diabetes checks. In 2017, the organisation also ran 950 mental health awareness workshops and had more than 7,000 employees completing online Mindapple courses, which trains employees on stress management, how to maintain concentration, develop innovation, and increase motivation.
Dave Lewis, Tesco’s chief executive officer, personally communicated the new partnership to staff via an email and the organisation also shared videos highlighting details from its last health-related event.
The partnership will include aligning Tesco’s communications campaigns with national health campaigns, training Tesco pharmacists to better support customers in the prevention and management of heart and circulatory disease, cancer and type two diabetes, sharing anonymised sales information to help develop insight on health policy and public health programmes, and fundraising for more health research.
Lewis said: “I’m really excited by what we’re announcing. This is a unique partnership, which will bring together the skills and expertise of the UK’s leading health charities and the UK’s leading food retailer to help tackle the biggest health challenges facing the nation.
“Together with the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, and Diabetes UK, we want to help people take small steps on their own terms to develop healthier habits. It’s about unlocking the energy, expertise and reach of our different organisations to develop little helps that make healthy differences across the whole country.”