Hymans Robertson LLP
For Hymans, delivering the best support to clients hinges on staff being healthy, well and happy
“Our wellbeing journey started about ten years ago, purely because we believe that looking after our people is the right thing to do. Our approach centres on four wellbeing ‘pillars’ – physical, mental, social and financial and over the years we have introduced initiatives that align with each of these pillars. We work in a fast paced client facing environment and our dedication to our clients is well known within our industry. However, to be able to do our best work for our clients, we need to ensure our people know they have support from the firm to look after their own wellbeing. Our key objective is to ensure that our people feel that wellbeing is taken seriously. We have purposefully not set KPIs or ROI targets for our wellbeing initiatives, as we don’t believe crude measures adequately capture their significance. What is important is the quality of the feedback we get from our people, which we take anecdotally and via our employee opinion surveys.
How our journey has played out over the years:
Phase 1 – focusing on physical wellbeing with workshops and inter-office challenges and also the provision of our Employee Assistance Programme.
Phase 2 – we built out our benefits to include more wellbeing related benefits. Additions included Office Based Health Checks (more accessible & affordable than formal health checks from insurance companies), cancer screening, will writing, sabbatical purchase (banked days for extended paid leave at a future point), and most recently the opportunity to access independent financial advice.
Phase 3 – the appointment of wellbeing champions in each office. We introduced these in late 2015 and since then the wellbeing champions have grown in confidence. They now fully own the wellbeing agenda for their office, with our Head of HR simply acting as chair of the group – wellbeing is no longer seen as an HR activity but a business-owned activity. Our champions run a comprehensive wellbeing week in each office annually.
Phase 4 – we introduced mental wellbeing with the roll-out of our mental wellbeing statement and training for all line managers on spotting & dealing with signs of poor mental health (run by MIND). We also shared blogs from people in our business on how they manage their mental health (including from one of our equity partners on his battle with depression) and the appointment of mental health first aiders in each of our offices.
Phase 5 – saw us embed wellbeing into our employee value proposition, introduce agile working for everyone and introduced a “dress for your day” approach to allow people more control.
Phase 6 – The launch of financial wellbeing to include several sessions per annum on savings and pensions (including up to a very sophisticated level of understanding) and provision of a mortgage broker who provides in-office bi-monthly consultations.
All initiatives were introduced in consultation with senior management and our employee focus group, ensuring they were well supported and championed from day one.”
Written by Steve Moore, Head of Human Resources
