Award-winning | Pacific Life Re's mental wellbeing strategy: 'It's top-down and bottom-up'

It’s not been unusual this year to hear employers talk about people as their biggest assets – but there are examples where actions don’t quite meet the words.

As Lucy Bilton, Head of HR Europe at Pacific Life Re, the global reinsurance giant, describes: “Many employers say their people are their biggest assets. However, I wonder how many really mean it; really do anything long-term and sustainable with regards to mental health and wellbeing support, or simply resort to a set of well-meaning, yet invariably disjointed initiatives.”

Yet, as Pacific Life Re and Bilton see it, this last year should’ve acted as an impetus for employer’s words on mental health to translate into strategic action of programmes.

Especially as so many studies found that employee mental health has been severely buffeted – 2020 data from Wade Macdonald revealed that almost one-third of employees say that their mental health has declined as a result of the pandemic.