Nearly 4,000 Wates Group employees are being offered training in building personal resilience to boost mental health and wellbeing
The training will provide staff with strategies to improve their personal resilience and help to build a resilience ‘toolkit’ of approaches they can follow to help manage pressures and stress at both work and home.
Beginning in June and delivered by Wates’ employee mental health partner Everymind at Work, the ‘Bouncing Back’ programme is one element of the Group’s holistic long-term wellbeing plan.
‘Bouncing Back’ aims to:
- Reduce the number of absences due to work-related stress
- Ensure that all workplaces impact positively on people’s wellbeing
- Ensure that every employee feels supported to achieve a fair work-life balance.
Construction and workplace stress
A recent survey from the Chartered Institute of Building (2020) found:
- 26% of construction industry professionals had thought about taking their own lives in 2019
- 97% recorded being stressed at least once in the last year. Job insecurity, long hours, time away from families, lack of support from HR and late payments were all contributory factors
- 70% had experienced depression and 87% had experienced anxiety over the past year.
Caring for the health and wellbeing of Wates’ team
Kelly Osborne, head of health and wellbeing at Wates Group, said: “Ours is an industry with a lifestyle that can be challenging and stressful, with long and demanding hours, and with many often working away from home on site for weeks.
“The pressures of managing Covid-19 have increased the stress levels and the pressure on our mental health is immense.
“But even before Covid-19 struck, mental health in our industry was a major concern. Male construction workers are nearly three times more likely than others to take their own life, with one suicide every day.
“This has been an incredibly tough year for so many of our colleagues, and we want to support everyone, so they feel better equipped to manage setbacks and stress in their lives confidently and effectively, and thereby help protect their mental health.”
Paul McGregor, founder of Everymind at Work, said: “Mental health is a real issue within the workplace currently, with businesses still being afraid to tackle it head on in a proactive way and waiting until an issue arises before they do anything about it.
“Construction is an industry known for its high suicide rates and lack of mental health support, so businesses in this sector need to do more than the ‘norm’.
“It’s great to see an organisation like Wates taking the mental health of its colleagues seriously. The more businesses can be proactive, offering employees various tools and resources, the quicker they can start to normalise mental health conversations within their workplace.”
