Promoting employee wellbeing

We aim to create a healthy working environment so our people can achieve their full potential and contribute to our success.

We can only sustain great performance for the company if our people achieve their full potential over the long term. Keeping them safe, healthy and motivated is vital.

We use a three tier framework to guide our work in this area: promoting good health, safety and wellbeing to enhance performance and minimise harm. Anticipating potential problems and identifying opportunities early to secure better outcomes. Responding effectively to ill health or traumatic events to speed a return to productive working.

We aim to create a sense of self-reliance, where our people take responsibility for their own wellbeing and positively influence others, within a culture of supportive and enabling leadership. Our Group Health, Safety and Wellbeing Forum comprises of senior leaders from all lines of business and monitors progress against our plans. They report to the Board of Directors and the Operating Committee who are responsible for setting and implementing the health, safety and wellbeing policy. Our health and safety risk is monitored both through our internal risk governance mechanisms and by independent verification, for example, of our network safety assessments.

Progress in 2014/15

Reducing accidents

We reduced our Lost Time Injury (LTI) rate by 23% to 1.5 incidents, exceeding our KPI target by 21.6%. We achieved this through initiatives that promoted safer behaviour among employees, and supporting leaders in management and engineering functions to develop stronger skills and knowledge of health and safety best practice. More than 97% of our people completed their required health, safety and wellbeing training in 2014/15. We met our target of receiving no health and safety prosecutions or prohibition notices.

We aim to create an agile working environment that uses technology to create possibilities for our people and the business. Flexibility is key and we seek to be innovative in offering options that work for all. Arrangements such as part-time roles, home working and job shares have been in place for many years but increasingly our employees are operating within a more agile and less rigid structure.

Despite a good improvement in sickness absence rate (SAR) across most lines of business, we failed to meet our KPI target. Our overall SAR rose from 2.1% in 2013/14 to 2.2% in 2014/15 due to an increase in the number of days’ absence caused by mental ill health and musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) in Openreach and, to a lesser extent, BT Wholesale. Analysis has shown that factors driving these extended absences include late intervention and use of existing specialist support services.

To tackle this, a further 747 managers completed a one day workshop to improve their understanding of mental health issues. Nearly 7,900 have been through this training since 2009. This has been supplemented by integrating personal and organisational resilience into our wider leadership programme, and in 2014/15 we trained more than 580 senior managers in these skills.

We have amended our case management procedures to engage occupational health support at an earlier stage for mental ill health and MSD. We have also promoted our Employee Assistance Programme for early intervention and of the 4,570 employees who used the service in 2014/15, 97% reported feeling better equipped to deal with their problems. We have further developed our BT-funded psychological and MSD rehabilitation services. 92.6% of people engaged with these programmes in 2014/15 were able to return to or continue in their own role without adjustments.