blog: Bronze accreditation for our Birmingham team
Wednesday 22nd April 2020
Here at ITP, we're constantly looking to improve both the way the world moves, and creating a healthy and happy working environment for our staff forms an important part of that. That's why we're pleased to announce that our Birmingham team has achieved bronze accreditation for the ‘Thrive at Work’ initiative.
What is Thrive at Work?
As you may know, we've been participating the West Midlands Combined Authority's (WMCA) Thrive at Work initiative since summer 2018 and we secured further funding in 2019 to continue.
The aim of the initiative is to promoting health and wellbeing in SMEs in the West Midlands and focuses on how the company can have an impact on supporting good physical and mental health in employees. The ultimate goal is for the workplace to benefit from happier staff and the associated performance benefits generated by this.
A happier and healthier team
Since launching the initiative, our Birmingham team have introduced a number of measures, including:
- 'Lifestyle’ and ‘management practices’ surveys to understand current health and wellbeing practices and identify improvements.
- Twice weekly fruit deliveries to the office.
- New lunchtime running and walking clubs.
- Monthly lunches to support local independent businesses within Birmingham city centre. At these lunches we discussed different aspects of the Thrive at Work scheme, as well as lots of informal chat too.
- Participation of sports classes, such as yoga, at local centres during lunchtimes.
- New training opportunities for staff; including for mental health and wellbeing.
- Participating in volunteering for local organisations, including the Queen Alexandra College.
WMCA reviewed the measures that we introduced and were satisfied that we were fully committed to the wellbeing of our employees and in particular, they praised the effective policies that had been integrated into working practices, to support employee wellbeing, the broad level engagement achieved and the change in behaviour. As a result of this significant progress the team were awarded bronze accreditation.
Sharing best practice
Thrive at Work has achieved such a positive change in our Birmingham office, that we're keen for the benefits to be experienced by the rest of the company too. We're working hard to ensure that initiatives continue in Birmingham whilst at the same time, rolling out similar initiatives across our other four offices. We’re currently updating our company policies with ambitious plans to implement positive change through the extra wellbeing initiatives that Thrive introduced.
Our next steps will involve each of our offices undertaking the lifestyle survey to tailor our approach to the needs of the teams in each office.
Thriving at home
Given that everybody at ITP is currently working from home, we're keen to ensure that the spirit of Thrive remains present in the company. Initiatives have been introduced to ensure that all staff continue to feel connected to their colleagues and friends through frequent sector and office meetings, where we have discussed opportunities to remain healthy both physically and mentally. We've also introduced lunchtime games including online Pictionary and quizzes to help everybody stay connected.
Although we're all looking forward to seeing our colleagues again when lockdown is over, the first lunchtime run club when we're back in the office may prove to be hard work!