Beaverbrooks celebrates its 71st opening in the friary shopping centre guildford
Happy Beaverbrooks teams open their latest store in Guildford, Surrey.

Beaverbrooks focuses on wellness in the workplace

Beaverbrooks has been an almost constant presence on the Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For over the past decade, and now wants to go beyond being a great employer by initiating a programme focused on becoming a better workplace with mentally and physically healthier employees.

The programme, which will be discussed with managers in more detail at Beaverbrooks’ conference in March, will encourage every employee to think about how they can improve their own physical and mental health and wellbeing. The company will then come up with ways to enable them to improve.

“Culturally, one of the best things we have done as a company was to build on [chairman] Mark Adlestone’s paternalistic outlook, which made us a great employer because we would give and give and give. What we then recognised was that our role is not to just be a great employer, but also to create a great workplace. We have 71 stores, and we need to make sure that each one of those stores as well as our head office are great places to work that improve people’s wellbeing,” explains Anna Blackburn, managing director of Beaverbrooks in a Big Interview with WatchPro for the February edition of the magazine. “The retail environment can be seven days a week, 15 hours a day. That is not an easy place to take care of yourself, so we need to redefine what wellbeing means within Beaverbrooks,” she adds.

“Wellbeing is about physical, mental and emotional health, and we want to do something at conference that helps our managers to be strong for their teams, but not to become so maternalistic or paternalistic that their teams become reliant on them to solve all their problems,” Ms Blackburn continues.

“Individual resilience is something we talk about. Wellbeing is a shared responsibility. We can do so much but there has to be a balance,” she concludes.

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