Why Health & Employee Wellbeing should be at the top of your business agenda

Here at Acacia Training, we practise what we preach.

Everyone who works for us or with us knows that employee wellbeing and staff development is the focus of all we do – whether we are talking about our own staff or our learners who work for our many clients.

That’s why we’re really pleased to announce that we were recently awarded ‘Silver’ accreditation at the Stoke on Trent Healthworks Awards.

What did our Healthworks accreditation involve?

The accreditation process for our staff wellbeing involved:

• an intense review of our health and wellbeing measures,
• interviewing a cross-section of employees to ensure they received an authentic viewpoint of what it’s like to work for Acacia.

Why is staff wellbeing and mental health in the workplace important?

Unfortunately, even in 2020, it’s not uncommon for businesses to overlook the emotional wellbeing of employees. But with stats from the Health and Safety Executive showing that more than 11.7 million working days are lost every year due to stress related illness – it’s something businesses can no longer choose to ignore!

It’s standard for companies to have trained emergency first aiders – now we want to make it standard for them to have mental health first aiders too.

We believe that when it comes to employees’ mental health, prevention is always better than cure and it’s fantastic to see more and more major UK companies realising the importance of wellbeing at work and signing their employees up to our Mental Health First Aid training courses.

We’ve had such positive feedback from people who have done the course and told us that they found it life-changing!

What kind of things can help promote employee wellbeing?

During this process, Healthworks Awards praised a number of initiatives that contribute to employee satisfaction. Here are some of them to help you with ideas:

• A family oriented working environment,
• Encouraging flexible working
• Providing staff advice on healthy living
• Free fruit deliveries for the office
• A company choir that brings us all together and makes us feel good!
• Staff feel that there is an ‘open door’ policy whenever they need additional support and know that ‘it’s ok to talk’.
• We invest significantly to ensure staff received training from their inhouse team of mental health first aiders as a way of preventing mental health problems in the workplace.
• Our newly launched ‘Wellonomics’ employee wellbeing checker enables Acacia Training’s staff and students to give anonymous feedback. This has been invaluable to help us put the right follow up measures, support and training in place wherever needed

More information about Mental Health First Aid and Employee Wellbeing surveys

Acacia Training’s Mental Health First Aid training is a two-day course which gives participants a deeper understanding of the issues that affect people’s mental health and teaches them practical skills that can be used every day, including how to spot symptoms, assessing the risk of self-harm, confidentiality and the best way to offer support.