UK 
United States
The wellbeing of staff has been one of the main pillars HR leaders have focussed on, however since the coronavirus pandemic took hold, the wellbeing of employees has risen straight to the surface as staff and employers have faced new and untold issues they could not have predicted.
For example, many organisations will be concerned that employees or their close family members could contract the virus which could impact staff. Similarly, workers have grown more and more anxious when it comes to their health and job security following the ongoing news of redundancies and job losses as the economy continues to dramatically decline.
This is echoed in recent research by Willis Towers Watson, which discovered that over 90% of employees feel some form of anxiety as a result of coronavirus, meanwhile stats shared by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) indicated that more than six million Brits are concerned about their jobs and more than five million are worried about their household finances.
One business that acted fast to support is workforce is the UK publishing business Bauer Media. Having already rolled out a programme called THRIVE to support staff, Jill Ford, Head of HR/Business Partner for the firm, shared that this was ‘dialled up’ during the pandemic in order to offer better communication and connectivity to teams. “Bauer has always had a THRIVE programme, but this was dialled up during lockdown with daily THRIVE activities to connect and support our teams during the transition to homeworking,” she told HR Grapevine.
