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WELLBEING

SOCIAL

WELLBEING

SOCIAL

WELLBEING

We believe in delivering excellence and unlocking potential – but this can only be achieved by providing a safe and supportive working environment where people can flourish. We aim to do this by embedding a positive working culture through helpful working practices; by creating opportunities for people to share ideas and access the tools and resources they need to achieve a good work-life balance, and by sharing responsibility for positive wellbeing and supporting wellbeing objectives.

Key statistics

Creating a supportive working environment

Spotlight on our wellbeing days

Contributing members

UN Sustainable Development Goals

Stories

of colleagues used their Wellbeing Day

groups focussed on improving wellbeing at WBD

Talk Clubs piloted in Leeds and Newcastle offices

colleagues received grief first aider training

Creating a supportive working environment

Colleagues taking part in a Legal Walk – they are walking away from the camera.

In Newcastle, our colleagues run a monthly Wellbeing Walk. For our September walk, we were joined by our client, Nexus, to mark World Suicide Prevention Day. We were also joined by, and raised funds for, James' Place, a charity who support men in suicidal crisis. The event started some important conversations and highlighted the power of working together with our clients with shared values. This was our highest attended wellbeing walk to date.

In order to encourage male employees to engage more with wellbeing activities, we piloted Talk Clubs at our Leeds and Newcastle offices. This is a way for men to connect and chat with others. You can read more about this here.

We raised awareness of the health support we offer to colleagues and our key wellbeing groups, such as our Menopause Champions, Men's Health Group and Mental Health First Aiders, through campaigns to mark Women’s Health month, World Menopause Day, Mental Health Awareness Week and Men’s Health month.

Five colleagues in Newcastle celebrating World Mental Health Day. They are drinking cups of tea and smiling.

We continue to offer a range of sports and social activities to our colleagues across our offices, including crafts clubs in Newcastle for Mother's Day and Christmas; quiz & curry night in Plymouth; and lunchtime choir practices and performances in Bristol.

Back to the top

We continued the roll out of our Resource Management platform to cover the whole of our Real Estate business group, supporting our goal of healthy high performance by allowing for greater visibility of workloads, wider working networks, and increased opportunity for our fee earners. This new approach has increased the opportunity for cross office and cross team working with 72% of roles being fulfilled by teams working across office locations over the last year. We will continue to learn from the roll out and use feedback to inform our action plans for other teams.

In recognition of the need to provide more specific support to those experiencing loss and grief, we have trained new Grief First Aiders. You can read more about this here.

As signatories to the Mindful Business Charter, a group of our Wellbeing Champions have been leading a Working Practices project that looks at stress in the workplace and how it can be prevented, rather than just managed. This is in response to Investors in People and exit interview feedback, and aligns with SRA guidance on culture and wellbeing. Two proposals are being progressed for action in FY 2025/26.

Spotlight on our wellbeing days

Everyone at WBD is entitled to one Wellbeing Day each financial year, and this is separate and in addition to holiday entitlement. It's an opportunity for colleagues to take a day to focus on their wellbeing–this could be anything from a day to get on top of to do lists, to a day spending time with family, to a day off for a birthday.

Sharing her pride in the increase in our Wellbeing Day utilisation to 85.5%, up from 58% in FY 2023/24, Jane Freeman, HR Manager, said:

"With support from our Wellbeing Champions, we managed to improve wellbeing day utilisation far beyond our target of 65%. This is testament to the valuable support that our Champions provide in supporting our wellbeing campaigns and Responsible Business objectives. We were all thrilled to reach 85.5% utilisation rate."