News
Hill News November 2022- Update From Our CEO, Dr Jonno Hill
Date: 16 Nov 2022
Author: Hill Laboratories
Our leadership team has been having more conversations over the last two years about what we can do to help our staff to improve their physical and mental health.
These 'wellbeing' conversations have moved beyond the traditional health and safety space, and have largely been in response to the challenging pandemic years with the physical and mental stressors that have been at play.
Now, while we hope and expect the worst of the Covid pandemic to be behind us, these wellbeing conversations still feel important and timely, given how tight the labour market has become.
We all agree that the most important thing we can do as employers to allow our staff to thrive is to remunerate them fairly. We knew that we were not where we wanted to be in that regard, and so a few years ago we decided to work with a company named Strategic Pay to understand how our remuneration rates compared with market averages for similarly-sized roles. Pay gaps were identified and we have invested significantly over the last two years to close that gap, though there is still more work to be done.
We felt ready to do more in the wellbeing space this year, and so we recently conducted an anonymous staff survey around wellbeing and saw some concerning results relating to the levels of stress that many of our staff are feeling. Most of the biggest stressors are coming from outside of work, but we nevertheless wanted to come up with some new initiatives that could be beneficial.
A recent initiative was to establish free access to a local gym and pool for our Hamilton-based staff (with equivalent solutions to be rolled out to our other sites), along with subsidising healthier food options at our on-site cafe in Hamilton. It is early days, but we are already seeing a positive shift in the sort of food being sold at our cafe, and a good number of staff are taking advantage of the free access to the gym and pool.
It's great to see so many of our staff making good choices relating to nutrition and exercise - it's good for them, and must surely be good for us as employers too.
We are interested to learn about what other organisations are doing in the wellbeing space, so please get in touch if you would like to compare notes.