Partners& employees

As a business focused on partnership, our people are at the centre of our thinking and pivotal to the success of our business. If there’s one thing we learned in 2021, it’s the link between our physical and mental wellbeing and our overall ability to perform to the best of our ability. To get ahead of the curve, we launched a Belonging, Inclusion and Wellbeing programme for our people called BEAT, which stands for, Belonging, Energy, & Culture, Together. From a people perspective, it’s the best thing we’ve done.

Partners& – wellbeing and belonging

We created the BEAT programme to provide everyone with the education and the tools to help create a truly inclusive and productive workplace. We want to ensure our colleagues feel they belong and can contribute in a safe environment and, through greater awareness of the impact of wellbeing, are able to perform at their peak to support both our clients and team members. In December 2021, we were thrilled to win the ‘Diversity and Inclusion Award’ at the UK Broker Awards, run by Insurance Age magazine.

January – let’s make new habits

We started January as we meant to go on. A time historically associated with changing our lives for the better, we focussed on creating good habits and how in so doing, we can build our resilience.

We delivered the programme in a series of webinars throughout the month, which are now available on catch up for anyone who missed the live event.

Dr Heather McKee – ‘The art of creating lasting change.’

Dr Heather McKee delved into the ‘how’ of creating new habits. She taught us that most of us fail in our new year’s resolutions because we make the changes too big. Apparently, the changes should be so small that our friends should laugh when we tell them what they are. It’s called the ‘giggle test’.  Dr McKee urged us to praise ourselves every time we implement our new habit; doing a silent drumroll on your desk will help build a link from your brain that associates the new habit with happiness. Also, we don’t ‘give up’ bad habits, we just crowd them out with new ones.

Le’Nise Brothers – ‘Building resilience with brain food.’

‘Resilience is our ability to bounce back from stressors, be they at work, from a bad night’s sleep, from a difficult conversation or from illness.’ Le’Nise taught us that inflammation of the immune system, chronic stress, lack of physical activity and a lack of sleep can all contribute to lack of resilience. She taught us about the foods we need to consume on a daily basis to improve and maintain a healthy immune system. Aside from a regular intake of antioxidant rich foods such as salmon, grass fed beef, eggs and avocado, Le’Nise also advocated ‘adding things in’ to a diet to help increase our daily fruit and vegetable intake; she highly recommends the use of ‘good fats’ such as olive or avocado oil.

Craig Pritchard – Integrity 365 – ‘Financial wellness.’

A colleague worrying about debt or suffering any form of financial angst is not a happy or focussed colleague and we think educating our staff on ‘financial wellness’ is one of our core duties as an employer. We work closely with our ecosystem partner, financial advisers Integrity 365, who devoted their webinar, delivered by Craig Pritchard, to taking control of our finances and getting into good financial habits. Craig suggested doing an audit so we had clear sight of our incomings and outgoings, and looking at each regular outgoing payment and asking ourselves if we really need it or if we could get it cheaper elsewhere? He also advocated saving any surplus income, creating an emergency fund and looking at income protection.

Feedback from our employees was that they found the sessions very useful, with many eager to take the lessons learned and start implementing them into their everyday lives.

Coming soon: In March, we will be celebrating International Women’s Day, launching our partnership with young person’s charity Working Options www.workingoptions.org.uk and our collaboration with mental health charity MIND.

For more information about how Partners& work, what we do and why we are different then contact Chris Boothman in our Bolton office or visit our websitewww.partnersand.com