City of London Corporation

The City of London’s Corporate HR department developed a strategy on workplace health and wellbeing.

Aims and Goals

The Corporation is committed to supporting and promoting the City as the world leader in international finance and business services. It intends to establish the City as the world’s foremost ‘healthy workplace setting’ for the 360,000 people who commute into the City on a daily basis.

With this long-term goal set on the agenda for the Corporation, it was important that it reviewed and improved its own workplace health practices to demonstrate best practice. It was well understood that if the City were unable to do this, its ability to lead and influence other organisations would suffer.

Approach

With workplace health highlighted as a national priority by Public Health England, the City of London’s Corporate HR department developed a strategy on workplace health and wellbeing. The broad objectives were identified as:

• Reduce sickness absence further and facilitate successful returns to work
• Develop positive strategies for mental wellbeing at work
• Improve motivation, performance and working relationships
• Support managers to understand and manage wellbeing at work
• Improve culture and awareness about wellbeing at work

A big step for the City in approaching this strategy was to demonstrate its commitment to workplace health through the London Healthy Workplace Charter. This included a review of HR policies using staff feedback, a survey to inform the City on job satisfaction, staff retention, levels of presenteeism and analysis of statistical data to identify trends and gaps in the City’s wellbeing provisions.

Results

The City of London Corporation was awarded Silver for the London Healthy Workplace Charter in October 2014. The panel made particular mention of the City’s strong senior level support, positive address of any issues around bullying and harassment in the organisation, a strong health and well-being working group with cross-departmental representation and a strong attendance management overview process.

The award is an excellent platform from which to continue the strategic review of Health & Wellbeing, and aim for ‘Excellence’.