NICE (the National Institute for Clinical Excellence) has just published its finalised Quality Standard on Healthy Workplaces (Healthy Workplaces; improving employee mental and physical health and well-being). NICE has a well-established and rigorous process to inform the development of evidence based standards and has worked with expert groups including the Mental Health Provider Forum, the NHS Health At Work Network and Public Health England to develop standards to support the improvement of employee health.
The standards provide 4 simple statements that organisations are advised to adopt to improve employee health:
- Statement 1: Employees work in organisations that have a named senior manager who makes employee health and wellbeing a core priority.
- Statement 2: Employees are managed by people who support their health and wellbeing.
- Statement 3: Employees are managed by people who are trained to recognise and support them when they are experiencing stress.
- Statement 4: Employees have the opportunity to contribute to decision-making through staff engagement forums.
Our experience at Empactis emphasises the importance of these and our platform is designed to ensure that organisations do have clarity on who is accountable for actions to support employee health and that managers are given the support to actively take actions in a timely manner to improve their employee’s health.
I recently contributed to the Fit for Work Coalition’s response to the Green paper consultation on Improving Lives, which also highlighted the key role managers can play. The NICE statement makes it clear that managers should have the skills and knowledge to support staff health and that their performance reviews should include an evaluation of how well they support their staff.
As the data gathering capability of our system increases we are seeing the evidence of this, improving manager compliance with simple processes such as making timely call backs and arranging timely return to work interviews with staff does reduce absence and is valuable to good employee health.
More detail on the NICE statements can be found on their website:
