Policy Reviews for the Mental Health Productivity Pilot: Coventry University for the Midlands Engine
The need: The Mental Health Productivity Pilot has been funded by the Midlands Engine to work with businesses across the Midlands region to improve workplace mental health and to reduce the impact it has on sickness absence, presenteeism and productivity. There was a need to provide participating businesses with a Status Report to summarise their current the status of their health and wellbeing provision, and review the adequacy of their existing policies to identify areas for improvement.
Our approach: We worked in partnership with the team at Coventry University to identify a pragmatic approach to supporting businesses to develop and strengthen their policies and practices. To do this we:
- Adapted our evidence-based policy review tool to ensure that it captured priority policy markers
- Worked with multi-disciplinary stakeholder groups to design the reporting framework and agree the implementation process, to ensure the output was simple, clear and accessible to those unfamiliar with people management policies thereby ensuring that all small business owners and administrators could take action following the receipt of the policy review report
- Produced a status report for 43 organisations, and an in-depth policy report for eleven organisations all of whom submitted between 3-8 policies related to health and wellbeing for review
- Developed recommendations to guide policy and practice development, with a focus on pragmatic low cost interventions to promote and protect health and wellbeing
The outcome:
The feedback from the organisations who received the reports was positive and all organisations have reported taking actions to improve health and wellbeing. A full evaluation is currently underway including pre- and post- survey measures including indices of work and health, and interviews to inform on implementation issues. Full findings will be produced in January 2024 however early indications are that all organisations have made some progress against key metrics of employee health and wellbeing including increased retention and reduced absence.
We have been delighted to work with Affinity Health at Work. Using their extensive knowledge of workplace interventions and analysis of data we have collaborate to produce a series of benchmarking reports for organisation taking part in a natural experiment. The work enabled our team to build bespoke mental health at work plans for organisations. One key element was the ability to draw out specific elements relating to the employer as well as those of the employee. A further element of work was undertaken to build a maturity assessment for workplace health and wellbeing strategies. This provided employers with a real time review through evidence-based assessment. This was extremely well received by our clients particularly the Small and Medium enterprises who sometimes struggle to produce a coherent set of policies.
The team at Affinity Health at Work have been fantastic to work with. They have been engaging, co-productive in their approach, met very challenging time constraints, with all of this built on built on a strong history of work in the field with a dedicated team of experts. I cannot recommend them highly enough.
