Taking time for wellbeing at Distinctly

Creating an environment where our employees’ wellbeing is looked after, ensures we have a happy and productive workforce. At Distinctly we are committed to providing a healthy workplace and are constantly looking at new ways to connect with our employees to improve their wellbeing. 

As part of our expansion of Distinctly Wellbeing initiatives and aligning with World Mental Health Day on the 10th October, we launched our first Wellbeing Week. It was themed around raising awareness of our holistic wellbeing.

Our aims for the week were three-fold: 

• To encourage us all to think about what affects our wellbeing 
• To give everyone access to tools to help manage their wellbeing better
• To create a moment of connection and conversation across the agency around wellbeing

Putting the focus into one week gave us all the opportunity to truly reflect on how we are looking after ourselves, and consider what we can do individually and collectively to further our sense of positive wellbeing.  

Some of the highlights of the week included: 

• A movement fitness workshop with Your Body Group, teaching us how to build more movement into our working day
• Your Body Group 1-to-1s which focused on answering individuals’ fitness goals, offered nutritional advice and answered women’s health questions
• A financial demystifying session from Ashbridge Wealth, entitled ‘Let’s Make Your Finances Less Daunting’
• A (re)introduction to the benefits of our private health care policy with WPA Healthcare
• 1-to-1 connection coffee breaks across the agency (with coffee vouchers and Graze snacks)
• A managing stress in the workplace learning lab session
• Training in Managing mental health from Mind 
• A Slack and meeting ‘Blackout afternoon’, to reduce our overall digital noise

Feedback from our employees has been incredibly positive. Throughout the week, over 86% of the agency thought about their wellbeing in a more holistic way and 65% sparked a conversation with a colleague about their wellbeing. 

As an employer, our responsibility to foster positive wellbeing doesn’t end here. We will continue to promote wellbeing good practice with our team and offer useful tools and outlets for support or advice. As half of our employees reported that following the completion of Distinctly’s Wellbeing Week, they plan to make changes to how they currently look after their holistic wellbeing, it is clear that the information shared to date will have an enduring impact of the health and happiness of our team.