The Company

Equity Housing Group has 140 employees who are based in one location in the UK. Their workforce has an average age of 37, a female to male ratio of 70:30, and almost all of them have access to a computer during working hours.

 

The Challenge

As an organisation, Equity Housing Group annually measures their employee engagement against the key performance indicators of the Best Companies engagement survey. Unfortunately, an outcome of the 2014/15 Best Companies Survey identified that ‘Wellbeing’ and ‘Fair Deal’, two of the key criteria, were areas of poor performance. Research into wellbeing and overall employee engagement highlighted that wellbeing touched their employees in many areas – such as sickness absence, voluntary turnover levels, and productivity in the workplace, to name a few.

Equity Housing Group reviewed the data of these factors and found that there were high levels of absence from work with personal-related stress being a contributory factor. On top of this analysis, feedback received from employee focus groups identified the need for a wellbeing programme that could encompass a wide range of initiatives and activities that would address a number of areas.

Media from awards night

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Equity Housing Group at The Engagement Excellence Awards 2016

The Approach

To kick things off, an onsite employee health screening initiative was launched which involved a 15-minute personal consultation with a health professional. Employees then received personal plans and the company received an overall wellbeing score with key information regarding areas of improvement. Once the results had been analysed, a wellbeing programme was produced to focus on key areas for the year ahead – fitness, mind, nutrition, and work-life balance.

Equity Housing Group were keen to give their people all of the necessary tools to focus on the key areas and, over the last 12 months, launched the following initiatives – lunchtime walking group, walking meetings, weekly running group (which took part in the Great Manchester 10k run and raised money for a local charity), monthly health and wellbeing newsletters, stress awareness courses, and Cycle to Work through Reward Gateway. A ‘Wellbeing' week was run, too, comprising of various sessions and activities, including a smoothie bike, a repeat of health checks, massage chair, nutrition talks, Zumba and Tai Chi, table tennis, posture masterclasses, and mindfulness promotion.

 

The Results 

To measure Equity Housing Group’s success, the most recent Best Companies results speak for themselves. They demonstrated a big improvement in employee engagement, as well as the key focus areas of both 'Wellbeing' and 'Fair Deal' seeing increased engagement over the last 12 months. Sickness absence rates have reduced, too, from 11.4 days per employee to 5.9 days per employee, with voluntary turnover moving from 17.6% to 6.14%. This can be partially attributed to the stress awareness sessions, which saw approximately 65% of employees in attendance.


Equity Housing Group has now completed two years’ worth of health screenings, and the four areas identified as needing development – fitness, nutrition, mind, and work-life balance – have all seen hugely positive improvement over the last 12 months. Part of this success can be taken from an increase in applications for employees to work on a flexible basis. Accommodating these requests certainly assisted in a number of employees achieving a better work-life balance.