At Amey, we’ve been making a real effort over the last few months to raise awareness of mental health issues and wellbeing, and sharing what tools and services are available for our employees to use, whether they’re a key worker delivering critical services or someone adapting to home working. We also wanted to make sure that employees who were just starting out in their careers had the support they needed.
An initiative we helped organise to tackle this, was launching a virtual Wellbeing Festival especially for graduates, apprentices and placement students. The digital event aimed to bring together over 300 of those starting out in their careers to provide a mixture of support, guidance and advice through talks and interactive breakout sessions delivered by internal and external experts.
The aims of the event were to:
- Raise overall awareness of wellbeing and mental health in ourselves and others
- Increase knowledge of the support and resources available
- Provide tools and techniques to encourage self-care including developing an individual wellbeing development plan to make a personal commitment to yourself
- Provide a networking opportunity with peers.
We wanted to make sure that they really knew they had our support and this was really shown by our CEO Amanda Fisher opening the event and holding a question and answer session. This included an insight into how she looks after her wellbeing, along with other senior managers giving advice and sharing their personal experience. Our Strategy Director John Faulkner also gave an overview of Amey’s strategy in managing Covid-19 along with how our innovative bounceback challenge would drive change and new ways of working across the business.
Our executive team really do invest in everyone’s wellbeing and it’s fantastic that everyone across the business can benefit. One attendee commented: “The best aspect about this event was the chance to hear from senior members of staff regarding wellbeing and their own experiences with stress, and how they manage it in their busy careers. The senior members of management and leadership were all very inspiring”.
It was a real pleasure to receive buy in from senior managers and brilliant feedback from those who attended. Initiatives like this make us feel lucky to work at a company like Amey, which takes pride in public service and actively supports its employees both in work and out of it.
At Amey we have a fantastic network of 215 Wellbeing Ambassadors and 120 Mental Health First Aiders across the business that offer support to our people and signpost them to help if they need it. Our Employee Assistance Programme has recently been enhanced to include employees’ immediate family members and offers advice on many topics and a 24/7 confidential counselling.
We’ve also introduced Wellbeing Wednesdays, which will take place on the first Wednesday of every month and have been introduced to highlight the importance of taking time out of your day to think about and look after your own wellbeing.