UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Wellbeing 2022
Version 1 Celebrates Wellbeing
Version 1 is thrilled to be listed as one of the UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Wellbeing 2022. This is the first year Great Place to Work has awarded Wellbeing, and we at Version 1 are delighted to receive the honour.
At Version 1 we want our employees to be healthy and live well. We strive to promote a culture of positive Health and Wellbeing daily. We also invest in a strong culture of wellness through programs, activities and resources that help our employees create their own journey toward optimal wellbeing.
Check out some of our Health and Wellbeing initiatives here.
This is not the only accolade for wellbeing we are celebrating this week as we have been recognised as a Healthy Place to work again this year! A key component of gaining this certification is The Healthy Place Survey. Employees take part in the Healthy Place Survey, self-reporting on the extent to which the organisation is considered to be a healthy workplace.
‘As with everything I have experienced with Version 1 in the 6 months I have been working here, no stone has been left unturned to make sure employees are the priority focus of the company. Starting with being made to feel like I was the only person joining the company (when there were 60 new starters in the same month), through to the induction training, onboarding, buddy-system, support from my line manager and colleagues and the HR department). Version 1 has a defined process and thoroughly thought-through procedure for everything to ensure the healthy well-being and support of staff.’ – Anonymous Employee
Q + A with Amanda Kelly, Head of Health and Wellbeing at Version 1
Do we review and update the strategy regularly in line with employee feedback?
Yes, listening to employee feedback is key to ensuring that we are focussing on the true needs of our employees. This has been pivotal to our success in being recognised as a Best Workplace in Wellbeing and Healthy Place to Work, but importantly launching initiatives that positively makes an impact on the wellbeing of our employees.
We do set out our wellbeing strategy at the beginning of the year, but we do take a flexible approach to this and adapt as needed. Our Great Place to Work and Healthy Place to Work surveys helps us to shape our wellbeing and people strategies for the year and our internal quarterly Trust & Empowerment surveys act as an additional pulse check and this is where we adapt. We work closely with our wellbeing champions and people managers to deeply analyse the results at an organisational, practice, team, and location level, this allows us to enhance our wellbeing plans and adapt them depending on the needs of individual teams, rather than having a one size fits all approach.
Does our strategy cover mental and physical wellbeing as a joint issue?
Very often mental and physical wellbeing are correctly interlinked, however, at Version 1, we take a holistic approach to wellbeing, with health & wellbeing being at the forefront of everything we do. Our “My Wellbeing” strategy focuses on 5 pillars: Sense of Purpose, Mental Health, Physical Wellbeing, Financial Management and Connections. We place equal focus on each pillar and don’t believe that one pillar is necessarily more important than the other.
Each quarter we run numerous events and initiatives under each pillar, whether that’s our online Yoga classes, financial management webinars, mindfulness series, celebrating recognition days or celebrating Excellence. We understand that not all employees are going to attend every event, but our holistic approach ensures that there is something in place for all our employees to benefit from. We provide our employees with a huge array of online resources which they can access in their own time which best suits them to enhance their overall wellbeing.
How has COVID-19 changed our strategy?
Yes, I think it’s fair to say that Covid has impacted our wellbeing strategy. Covid has forever changed how we work, and it’s been essential that we factor these changes into our strategy. Being in multiple locations, means that we always had a digital/remote focus when it comes to wellbeing, ensuring that all employees regardless of their team or location have the same experience.
A pivotal initiative that stemmed from Covid and also from our employee feedback was our WellTech programme, which takes a more personalised approach to wellbeing and aims to enhance the remote working experience for our employees, allowing them to order equipment to enhance their at home workplace. WellTech also offers tips to encourage our employees to move more throughout the day, advice to stay connected in a remote environment and supports our employees to work smarter. Working smarter isn’t about being more productive, it’s examining how we can best utilise our time and make smarter & healthier habits. This can incorporate anything from working more flexibly, setting focus time, removing notifications, or setting break times between meetings.
This personalisation aspect of wellbeing is a major element for our wellbeing strategy for 2022, where we look to humanise the experience for our employees. A fundamental programme to enhance our human experience this year will be the launch of our Moments that Matter programme by the end of Q1. The programme will put in place robust structures to ensure that we are celebrating and recognising predictable and unpredictable professional & personal moments that matter in our employees’ lives.
Are we doing all we can to promote the wellbeing schemes and initiatives we offer our employees?
There is so much that Version 1 offers to support the wellbeing of our employees from the events in our pillars mentioned earlier but also to create that sense of purpose and empower our employees to drive their careers. Is there more we can do? Of course, there is! We will always examine ways in which we can enhance the health and wellbeing of our employees. Therefore, our employee feedback is so crucial and why we encourage our employees to participate in our surveys, we invite our employees to let us know where and how we can improve and equally to let us know what we are doing well so that we can continue doing it.
Have we created an environment where staff feel comfortable coming forward with wellbeing issues?
Wellbeing is part of our everyday language and an integral part of our culture. From our most recent Trust & Empowerment survey, 96% of our employees feel comfortable asking other team members for help and 89% stated that at work have someone they can trust and talk openly to. I think this speaks to our culture of trust, empowerment, and psychological safety.
Are we offering equal support to remote workers in comparison to our office-based employees?We are of course at a transition stage now where some of our employees are starting to return to offices/customer sites. As mentioned earlier, a crucial element to our strategy is ensuring that all employees have the same experience, being a remote, hybrid or onsite worker is no different.
Over the past 2 years of the pandemic, we have continuously looked at ways to ensure that all employees feel part of a team, whether that’s new joiners to Version 1 or our existing employees. This is where our employees’ voices are pivotal and how we as an organisation act on their feedback.
For our new starters joining in a remote environment, our people managers have done a superb job in ensuring that our employees feel a sense of connection to Version 1 and their team. Our fortnightly inductions provide our new joiners with the opportunity to meet with key stakeholders from across the business but also meet other new joiners and start to build the Version 1 network. We also host a quarterly new joiner digital event which again is another avenue for our new starts to meet more of their colleagues.
In addition to our quarterly wellbeing events every quarter, we host a company-wide event for everyone to take part in, for example, our Step Challenge, Excellence Awards and Big Quiz of the Year. Again, the emphasis here is that employees can take part regardless of where they work from.
