British Safety Council’s Keep Thriving workshops end on a high note in Edinburgh

The wellbeing strategy workshops have been held monthly across the UK since January. The programme began in London then moved to Birmingham, Cardiff, Manchester and Bristol, before ending its run in Scotland’s capital.

Six Keep Thriving workshops were held across the UK between January and May. Photograph: British Safety Council

Experts from British Safety Council’s Being Well Together team have travelled the country to share their knowledge and experience of how to develop and implement a successful workplace wellbeing strategy with representatives from a broad variety of organisations employing up to 500 staff.

The interactive workshops covered a range of topics designed to equip attendees with the tools and insights they need to transform their workplaces into environments where employees feel valued, listened to, supported and able to thrive. Beginning with an interactive discussion on what workplace wellbeing is and why it matters, the sessions moved through the importance of designing a wellbeing strategy that fits the individual culture of each organisation, as well as how to boost engagement across all levels of the business.

Participants learned about the importance of tracking and evaluating the progress of wellbeing strategies to ensure that they are achieving what they set out to achieve, and to enable their companies to continuously improve and build upon their wellbeing offerings, in close consultation with employees.

Workshop attendees said they had found the sessions engaging and informative, and were looking forward to taking the ideas and information they had learned about wellbeing back to their respective companies and putting them into action.

“There have been a lot of things in today’s session that were very interesting, but the one thing that I think will certainly benefit us as an organisation will be how we communicate with our employees internally, and how we help them make their health and wellbeing better,” Alan Brown, HSE manager at Logan Energy, told Safety Management after the Edinburgh workshop. “We’ll look at wellbeing as a whole within the organisation and how we measure it, so we can come up with a proper strategy that will benefit particularly the employees but, in turn, the business as a whole.”

Chris Oliver, operations manager at Japanese Knotweed Solutions, who attended the Manchester Keep Thriving workshop, said he signed up for the session “to help our organisation develop the wellbeing policy into a more coherent strategy, to benefit from a higher-level understanding, and then to implement that on the ground for our organisation.” He said he left the workshop with “a much better understanding of how we can identify areas for improvement, and how we can really engage our staff to make things better for them.”

Gary Webster, HSE manager at Eland Cables, who also attended the Manchester workshop, said he is now “hoping to sit down with senior management to see if we can get a good business plan that involves a wellbeing format.”

Attendees from all six of this year’s Keep Thriving workshops will be invited to apply for the chance to receive up to £10,000 of funding from British Safety Council to help them develop a wellbeing strategy, once they have completed a survey on their progress six months after attending.

Learn more about British Safety Council’s Keep Thriving campaign here.