case study POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
sum of the parts
Focusing on employee engagement and wellbeing, Unipart set about making employees feel even more cared for, and training managers to really listen to people was key. To operate well, logistics relies on total commitment, so as well as engaged and happy people, the business benefits were immediately obvious.
W
hen one of our logistics centres found itself taking 80 hours a week to create and run reports, it was
engaged employees who took the time to work with their colleagues in IT to redesign the reports and automate part of the process to halve the time taken and save £20,000. There’s a wealth of untapped potential in every employee, but you can only tap into that if they’re at work and well. Ultimately, we believe that healthy, engaged employees will do their
the employee starts to talk about something personal, such as a relationship breakdown or financial worry.
ARTICLE BY
DEBORAH ASTLES HR DIRECTOR,
CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY & POLICY UNIPART
Healthy, engaged employees will do their best, which is why we’ve always placed wellbeing at the heart of our employee engagement initiatives.
Managers - the people with the most power to influence how cared for an employee feels - often have very little understanding of how what they say and how they listen can impact on employees
We recognised that essential to getting this human element right was creating a working environment where managers had the skills and confidence to talk and listen to employees about any issue they might be struggling with. Not least because trend data from Validium, and our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) provider, showed that the majority of calls they received from our employees were triggered by emotional distress associated with personal issues faced outside of work, such as relationship, debt or finance worries, with a significant number of calls related to sleep loss due to anxiety and stress. Although some employers might have questioned whether they needed to develop managers to be able to respond to anyone facing a non-work related problem, we knew that creating a listening culture is an essential, but often overlooked way, to make people feel cared for and deliver that all important ‘human touch’. Not to mention catch people before they become too stressed or anxious to work by directing them towards appropriate support when they, or a member of their family, is struggling to cope. Overall, our ultimate goal was to train managers to be able to talk to employees about any issue they might be struggling with.
best for us, and the customer, which is why we’ve always placed wellbeing at the heart of our employee engagement initiatives. Unfortunately, managers - the people with the most power to influence how cared for an employee feels - often have very little understanding of how what they say and how they listen can impact on employees, with most managers constantly missing out on valuable opportunities to connect with employees on a daily basis due to ten Fundamental Blocks to Listening, which are outlined at the end of this article. This ranges from filtering out what the employee is saying, to interrupting them to give unsolicited advice or changing the topic if
To get a psychologically sound foundation in place, we introduced a bespoke workshop, entitled ‘Managing Pressure Positively’, for managers who already had experience of training others or delivering occupational health. Each manager attended the workshop twice - first as a participant so that they could become familiar with the content, and secondly as an observing trainer so that they could sharpen their ability to deliver the workshop to other managers themselves. The first part of the half-day workshop involved exploring how to recognise when pressure, a positive force motivating us to succeed, can become negative
32 thehrdirector SEPTEMBER 2016
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