Supporting our colleagues to work well and live well

CARD Group Research & Insight is delighted to have signed up to the Work Well, Live Well Initiative. Work Well, Live Well is a workplace health and wellbeing support programme, funded by the Public Health Agency (PHA) and delivered by Northern Ireland Chest Heart and Stroke (NICHS). 

CARD Group Research & Insight is already a life-friendly employer. Staff can benefit from fully flexible working arrangements that meet their wider needs and interests from day one in their role. But we wanted to do more to value our wider team and ensure they have the support they need to work and to live well. Taking part in this initiative allows us to access training for staff and to join with a network of like minded organisations, sharing and learning from best practice.

Programme Implementation

We started by implementing a short anonymous survey with our team to find out more about their current levels of health and wellbeing, and what they would like the company to do to help them improve these. I volunteered to become our first Health Champion and to lead the development of a new 3-year workplace health and wellbeing plan. This work is now underway, building on the findings of the staff survey.

Throughout the programme, I participated in training to become a Health Champion and in training on Mental Health First Aid in the workplace. This was hugely beneficial in helping me to develop CARD Group’s new Health and Wellbeing Action Plan and for networking with Health Champions from across a range of different organisations.

Our plan is now rolling out. In October, we introduced an organisation-wide monthly Wellbeing e-news to share team news, ideas for boosting health and well-being, and to circulate upcoming training and development opportunities through NICHS and other agencies. The plan also contains opportunities to give back to the community with charity fundraising and volunteering opportunities. We have introduced a ‘charity of the month’ initiative and, before Christmas, we coordinated donations to a local Trussell Trust food bank. 

We have monthly staff wellbeing sessions scheduled from February covering topics including heart health, healthy eating on a budget and stress management. We will also be marking and/or celebrating a number of awareness days during the year – from the more serious, such as International Stress Day and World Blood Donor Day, to the fun and silly, such as Pizza Party Day and World Book Day!

In the background, the Action Plan will also see us working to update policies, risk assessments and training documentation to ensure that employee health and wellbeing are at the heart of what we do.

Team Feedback

Feedback from our team has been really positive, and we are seeing more and more engagement with new wellbeing initiatives. We are looking forward to working towards a happier, healthier workplace in 2024!