Beat the Winter Blues with Westfield Health

Westfield Health have created a series of free resources and guides to help you support your employees’ mental and physical health and wellbeing during the challenging winter months.

Their series of online resources offers straightforward and accessible guidance to help reduce stress and boost wellbeing both in and outside the workplace.

Four guides are available, which focus on different areas areas to help employees tackle the winter blues. These guides can be downloaded at any time from their Resources page here.

A challenging season

The winter months can be a struggle at the best of times. Dark nights, cold weather and the financial stress of Christmas can all have an impact on mental health. While for many the effects are temporary, COVID-19 will bring its own set of challenges and amplify existing health issues.

For many businesses, the economic forecast may look precarious. In June 2020, we surveyed HR leaders from across the UK to get their take on the developing situation. Almost 6 in 10 HR leaders anticipated a recession which will negatively impact their organisation.

While business leaders consider how best to stay afloat, their teams are bombarded with headlines fuelling stress and insecurity. We’ve created a COVID-19 resource centre which provides information and advice to help you manage employee health during the pandemic. It offers COVID-specific resources which complement these winter wellbeing guides.

Managing change, raising morale

The past six months have seen our workplaces reinvented.

For many of us, it’s been a turbulent time. Just when it feels we’ve got a handle on the regulations, new safety guidance is released and our plans change again. But as we adapt to new ways of working, there is an opportunity to be proactive.

Back in June, 75% of HR leaders predicted that we will be back to normal by the end of the year. As the months go on, we are facing a very different reality.

In many sectors, the workforce is now spread across new and diverse working environments, each with their own challenges. Even if your employees are working in a central location, social distancing can make it difficult to establish meaningful connections between teams. Around half of those surveyed felt their organisation hasn’t fully understood the implications of changing ways of work. By now many have started to put plans in place, but wellbeing strategies must be increasingly flexible to adapt to wider policy changes.