Workplace health

Our purpose is to champion everyone’s right to feel good and our healthcare agenda is growing with new services to support our customers in adopting healthier lifestyles.

We believe that to be authentic we also need to engage our people in adopting healthy lifestyles in the same way we encourage our customers.

Research undertaken from 2,784 customers in March 2010 supports this:

• 92% of Boots UK customers believe companies in general have a responsibility to look after their colleagues’ health, which in turn will enable them to deliver better customer service
• 88% of Boots UK customers agreed that it is important for Boots UK to look after the health of its colleagues, for them to believe that Boots UK can look after their own health.
• 86% of Boots UK customers expect Boots UK to be ahead of competitors in terms of promoting and ensuring health for their colleagues.

The profile of workplace health has been increasing over the past five years led by both Government and non-Government organisations targeting the workplace as a means of promoting health. We’ve been at the forefront of the importance of workplace health as a key Corporate Social Responsibility issue.

The healthy workplace team continues to pursue opportunities to promote a healthy lifestyle supporting colleagues to become advocates for the services we offer to our customers. There are a wide range of workplace health initiatives which could be undertaken, we have identified principles that any initiative must pass to be considered. These are that the initiative:

• Must fit with the business strategies – our brand or in response to a recognised issue
• Must be available to all of our colleagues
• Must be what our colleagues or customers want and would value
• Must have a business case.

The key activities we are currently delivering to our people are:

Raising awareness and understanding of mental health and stress

Branded as ‘Healthy Minds’ this includes user friendly information on our internal website with an e-learning programme which aims to reduce the stigma of mental illness, help managers in supporting our people with mental health conditions, give simple tips that our people can use to improve their own mental health and to also support customers.

Raising awareness and understanding of managing back problems

Branded as ‘Healthy Backs' this includes user friendly information on our internal website which aims to help colleagues and managers deal with back pain and specific longer-term back conditions with a particular emphasis on being fit for work and dispelling myths.

Launching an online health assessment

This enables our people to quantify their health, identify necessary actions to improve their health and monitor the effectiveness of these. Linked to the tool will be a number of offers to our people such as help with stopping smoking, weight monitoring and diets, with a more in depth health check for those who need it. The results from the assessment tool will allow us to identify and target our future healthy workplace activities.