Employee Benefits Reset 2020: KP Snacks has taken steps to adopt a new wellbeing strategy to support employees through the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic.
In a session titled ‘Future-proofing workplace wellbeing strategies’ in the Employee Benefits Reset online series, Martin Power, head of health and wellbeing at KP Snacks, explained how the organisation enhanced its communication strategy to support employees who were transitioning to working from home. With 2,300 employees working in a wide variety of functions, the business managed to create a strategy that fitted the whole workforce.
Through its internal senior management team, KP Snacks regularly looked at how it can better support its employees. Power said: “We used our communication channels while targeting specific groups of people to ensure that every group was being seen to. Employees that were unable to work remotely received different communication strategies to those that we were able to fulfil their role working from home.”
With restrictions forcing many employees to work from home, KP Snacks successfully adapted its current wellbeing strategies to the digital world. The employer relied on its internal mental health first aiders to create new a virtual strategy and regularly caught up on this initiative through virtual coffee mornings and workshops. Signposting online mental health support was crucial to ensuring that employees were aware of the mental health support available to them. KP Snacks also set out to support employees who had to shield due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The organisation was successfully able to offer counselling sessions, wellbeing workshops, as well as mental health check-ins through its employee assistance programmes.
Power explained that employees who were not used to working from home may have struggled to be engaged with their job, as well as struggling with their work-life balance. He said: “It is important for businesses to manage a good working-from-home culture, otherwise employees will have moved from a very controlled work environment to going into an uncontrolled work from home environment.”
Power believes employees are going to bring businesses out of the challenges that the pandemic bring and that it is important to offer effective wellbeing strategies to ensure that new employees joining the business feel a part of it, even when working remotely.
KP Snacks has seen a return on investment through how invested its employees are within the business and how productive they are at work .”They feel valued so they are going that extra mile,” said Power.
He also looked forward to future wellbeing strategies and discussed how KP Snacks plans on introducing physical health strategies in the coming months, in order to keep employees healthy and well despite current restrictions due to the pandemic. Additionally, Power predicted that businesses will benefit from offering more than just money to attract talent. He said: “It is important to just recognise something no matter how small the task is, it means a lot because there is more to life than just money.”
He concluded by providing insights on how to support the wellbeing of employees: “Take time to get to know your people, attain a grasp of what people actually want. We knew through our data that mental health was an area to address within the business. So that data should leverage where you intend to go in terms of wellbeing strategies.”