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Health and safety manager Amanda Casey says that workforce health will be at “the heart of everything we do” from now on.
Casey, who joined Glasgow-based Filshill just after the first lockdown, was initially focussed on ensuring staff and customer safety during the pandemic.
Since then she has expanded her remit to include well-being more generally, with a special focus on mental health.
She said: “In a busy wholesale operation like ours it is easy to associate health and safety with the safe operation of equipment like forklifts in our depot and drivers handling deliveries.
“So once we were confident the workplace was secure from a Covid perspective, our focus became the wellbeing of employees.”
The company has set up a wellness group and there are over 20 fully-trained mental health first aiders in the business who are supporting not just their colleagues but their friends and family too.
Each meeting – both in-person and virtual – starts with the host asking how everyone is.
Casey said: “We also introduced the concept of a wellbeing check-in at the start of all meetings, where employees can give an indication of how they are feeling on a scale of one to 10 if they feel comfortable doing so.
“This helps reduce the stigma of mental health over time because managers and leaders are encouraged to share their score too and explain why – signalling to colleagues that it is okay not to have a higher score.”
Filshill chief executive Simon Hannah said: “We have put mental health and wellbeing at the heart of everything we do.
“We recognise that as a responsible employer we need to do this not only for our employees and their families but also because of the positive impact it has on our business and our customers.
“This initiative has been recognised as the most successful one in the history of the business in terms of bringing our employees together and in the past year, under Amanda’s stewardship, we have dedicated more resources towards improving the mental health and wellbeing of our employees than ever before.”
