Lloyd’s of London

Lloyd's of London awarded 'Achievement' and now working on line manager training to gain 'Excellence'.

As the world’s specialist insurance market, Lloyd’s of London must consider the health and wellbeing of both its employees and market members. Lloyd’s is up for the challenge, and in 2014 we received the ‘Achievement’ award from the London Healthy Workplace Charter.

Why prioritise workplace health?

Like all organisations, Lloyd’s understands that healthy employees are happier and more motivated. We also recognise that our staff are gifted and talented individuals and we want to encourage them to continue working with us.

Lloyd’s Health and Wellbeing offering

Physical health

Lloyd’s goes beyond simply offering discounted gym memberships to engage our staff in physical activity.

We teamed up with ‘Step Jockey,’ a Department of Health backed initiative that measures buildings for calorie burn and encourages staff to take the stairs instead of the lift. Showers are provided for all Lloyd’s pass holders to encourage physical activity during the day – whether that’s running at lunchtime or cycling to work – and secure bike storage plus additional racking are available around the building.

The Lloyd’s Community Programme offers employees the chance to get out of the office and undertake physical activities on behalf of community schemes. This encourages team bonding, and has a positive effect on both physical and mental wellbeing.

Lloyd’s in-house catering service also provides healthy options and nutritional information, including Guideline Daily Amounts and tips for reducing fat and sugar consumption.

Mental health

Lloyd’s recognises that our employees don’t leave their lives at the door when they arrive at work, and at times they need extra support through challenging times. We have a dedicated Health & Wellbeing programme, which incorporates management training and tips to achieve a better work-life balance.

Our Employee Assistance Programme offers support, information, expert advice and specialist confidential counselling to help employees prepare for life’s predictable milestones and cope with unexpected events at work or at home. Line managers are offered specialist training and guidance to help them identify problems and the skills to support anyone facing difficulties.

We encourage a flexible working culture to allow our employees more control over their time. We are open to both formal and informal flexible working arrangements, job shares, part time work and phased retirement. We also have extensive practices in place to allow time off for dependents, as well as maternity, paternity, adoption and fertility treatment leave.

Data: what is the return on investment in workplace health?

One way of measuring the impact of health and wellbeing programmes is through attendance management, and at Lloyd’s we collate and monitor our absence rates and causes of absence.

In 2013 Lloyd’s absence rate was 1.66% – compared to the benchmark[1] figure of 3.6%. Managers are provided with a regular overview of attendance and contact is maintained with any absent employees so we can provide support and aid their return to work.

We carry out regular staff consultations and surveys to shine a light on health and wellbeing and to ensure we are delivering what employees need. We also gather feedback on working conditions, communication, work-life balance, staff support and other causes of stress and – most importantly – act on this feedback with ‘you said, we did’ style action planning to address any major issues raised.

Lloyd’s advice for small business and workplace health

All businesses, irrespective of size, can benefit from focusing on the health and wellbeing of employees. The important first step is to engage with individuals to find out what initiatives they’d like to see introduced – it’s surprising what great ideas people and teams can come up with at relatively low cost. We recently held an incredibly popular ‘step’ competition to see which team could walk the furthest during a month, with the winners awarded gift vouchers. Once the profile of health and wellbeing is raised it often gains natural momentum very quickly.

Next steps for Lloyd’s: Achieving ‘Excellence’

Although we were disappointed not to gain the ‘Excellence’ award on our first attempt, we looked long and hard at the reasons why. A key issue was that despite having some very good initiatives and procedures in place, we hadn’t offered formal training to our line managers on the importance of the health and wellbeing of their teams.

As a result we devised a series of 90 minute awareness training sessions for line managers which focused on the following:

• their occupational health and safety roles and responsibilities
• the fundamental aspects of mental health and wellbeing
• the HSE’s stress management standards
• how to recognise the warning signs that an individual may have a mental health issue
• disability in the workplace, and crucially
• where to go for support if and when an issue arises.

These sessions were very well received and we are now looking to extend them to employees as well as making additional information available on our intranet. We are also keen to engage with the City of London and share best practice with other organisations where we can.

[1] Benchmark is taken from the CIPD Absence Management Survey for the finance, insurance and real estate sector.