Thought Leader: How GHD brushed up its employee wellbeing programme

GHD used an innovative chatbot to bolster its employee wellbeing scheme during the COVID-19 pandemic, writes Sarah Helsdon EMEA people leader.

The COVID-19 pandemic turned the way we worked upside down, with many businesses, GHD included, shifting to a remote working model.

This brought its own challenges, with companies needing to ensure that employees had the right systems and equipment in place at home to carry out their jobs effectively. However, at GHD, we don’t believe that our responsibility as an employer stops there, and much of our people team’s focus during 2020 was on safeguarding the physical and mental health of our 10,000-strong global workforce.

The concept of wellbeing is extremely important to GHD and was the topic of various forums for more than 12 months prior to the pandemic. COVID-19 simply served as a catalyst for us to crystallise these discussions and introduce innovative solutions to provide employees with the tools and techniques needed to manage their mental health and wellbeing during an unusual and stressful time.

Introducing Ollie

We worked with Melbourne-based insights company The Evolved Group to train GHD’s engagement chatbot “Ollie” to understand the impact that Covid was having on employees.

While 'conversing' with our people each month about their experiences, Ollie learned to recognise COVID-19-related responses, seek further information and report back to GHD’s executive team on how well the company was managing the impact of the pandemic. Ollie also highlighted the key opportunities to improve GHD’s handling of situations.

For example, he spotted early on that workload and work-life balance were key themes. GHD reacted by asking teams at all levels to hold conversations about how the company could better support employee needs in these areas, which helped the business to improve our global operating approach on flexible working, while also informing the design and development of our wellbeing programme.

Wellbeing programme targeting employee equilibrium

Safety is one of our core values, but we wanted to apply a much more humanistic lens to this in the face of the pandemic. Central to this was the notion of equilibrium, as we wanted to help our people build and manage their energy reserves so that they could tackle the personal and workplace challenges associated with the pandemic.

We repeatedly referenced the analogy of fitting our own oxygen mask first before assisting others; in this case, educating ourselves and nurturing our personal wellbeing to ensure we’re ready to assist others in achieving equilibrium.

Other key components included the rollout of a 12-week education programme, establishing a wellbeing champions' network, introducing wellbeing moments at the start of meetings, and sharing simple weekly activities as a framework for leaders to work through with their teams. All the core content for the programme was housed in a new, interactive wellbeing portal on our employee intranet (which has been extremely popular).

Challenge as a springboard

We have been really pleased with the results of our innovation. What was evident early on was an increase in healthy dialogue among our people and a much more open and respectful attitude towards individual wellbeing.

We’ve seeing colleagues sharing wellbeing tips and a broader curiosity about what the future of work looks like – a future where wellbeing is given greater consideration.

The challenges of COVID-19 gave us a unique opportunity to re-assess the way our people work and we are committed to further embedding wellbeing as a core part of the way we do business.