Wellbeing at Zurich

Wellbeing is the way we think and feel about ourselves, our confidence, and our ability to control things in our life, both at home and at work.

We recognise the variation in the personal circumstances of our employees, and the demands and commitments on them in terms of balancing their home and working lives. We also recognise that these demands change during a person’s working life.

To support and promote a sense of physical and mental health among our employees we’ve established a wellbeing group that includes employee representatives. Its remit is to consider aspects of health and wellbeing associated specifically with physical and mental health, employee resilience and the work environment.

One of the areas of focus of our wellbeing programme is mental health. We demonstrated our commitment to raising awareness of mental health issues and removing the stigma attached to mental illness by signing the Time to Change pledge in 2014. This pledge is run by the charities Mind (one of Zurich Cares’ national partners) and Rethink Mental Illness. We have also developed training for both managers and employees on what to do if you experience a mental health problem.

We also run initiatives to encourage physical good health amongst our employees. For example, in 2014 we ran cancer awareness webinars, the ‘StepZ’ walking challenge, on-site screening for BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol & glucose, as well as healthy eating initiatives in conjunction with our caterers.

The company has a range of benefits, policies and support available to everyone that engender wellbeing including:

• An employee support facility - ‘Workplace Options’ - a free, confidential and independent phone service that can help with a wide range of issues 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
• A number of flexible working patterns e.g. part-time working, job sharing, compressed hours and home working.
• An industry leading flexible benefits package which includes childcare vouchers, cycle2work, dental care, private healthcare and health screening.
• We support employees with both long and short term illness, involving occupational health referrals, income protection and rehabilitation.