Duncan Claber

Said the following about Wellbeing Team South Western Railway:

“The wellbeing team are dedicated to promoting the physical, mental, and emotional health and happiness of colleagues within SWR. This includes undertaking mental health support, physical health initiatives, and fostering social connections alongside the engagement team. All of which has a positive impact on colleague wellbeing - including engagement, productivity, and attendance.

Within the wellbeing strategy, the following areas have been points of focus this year:

- Mental health support: An SWR webpage has been developed specifically to support mental health at work – it has 5 “buckets” which have a whole wealth of information on the following topics – support, resources, colleague stories, policies and procedures, FAQs. The website is supported with a family of 5 mental health awareness posters, all of which include a QR code taking people straight to the site.

- Drugs and alcohol: The team launched a new drug and alcohol online training programme linked to our Drug & Alcohol policy and SOPs – there is an all-colleague course aimed at giving everyone in the business an overview of our policy and information on the effects of drug and alcohol. For managers there is an additional course which gives more detail on how to support colleagues with these issues.

- Health: The team have embarked on a comprehensive awareness and training programme on cardiac issues and defibrillators by delivering wellbeing days and training days across the business. They have developed a cancer awareness wellbeing day which is delivered to colleagues on site with an emphasis on testicular and breast self-examination (using models to demonstrate).

- Physical wellbeing: Working with colleagues in the reward team, the team have arranged a football tournament aimed at bringing together colleagues with a shared interest to undertake a social / physical activity together.

Throughout the year they have supported physical activity working with our partner Total Active Hub to encourage colleagues to undertake at least 150 minutes of movement per week. They have done this by running a series of challenges – we have nearly 700 colleagues signed up and using the system regularly and this has allowed us to monitor their activities. The data shows that the average minutes of weekly movement is 312 with 131,511 miles having been travelled.

They have also worked with our sustainability team and for those that took part in challenges we planted trees – so far this year we have funded the planting of 10,332 trees. The feedback from this has been overwhelmingly positive with 87.8% of participants agreeing that the events have motivated them to do more exercise.“