Over the last three years we have seen a steady reduction in absence related to sickness from 3.06% in 2008/9 to 2.82% 2010/11. This equates to around 38,000 extra days attended at work.

Our morbidity (reasons for absence) has remained consistent with musculoskeletal disorders and mental health issue(including stress) being our most prevalent reasons for absence.

Strategy

Our four year health and wellbeing strategy runs to 2012. The programmes we run continue to develop and implementation across our business is delivered in an engaging framework to help support improvements in our employee physical and mental wellbeing. These programmes include :

• Managing employee exposure to workplace health hazards,
• Ensuring employees fitness to work across a range of challenging workplace environments and job roles,
• Providing engaging programmes to educate and support employees in healthy lifestyle choices and behaviour change.
• Proactively managing levels of attendance at work.
  encouraging our workforce to engage with the communities within which we live and operate.

Our health data identify our key areas for improvement. Our primary improvement programmes are becoming more targeted to impact upon these issues. The top three are :

• Musculoskeletal disorders
• Mental wellbeing
• General lifestyle / public health issues related to obesity, cardiovascular risk, and common cancers and an aging workforce

Wellbeing

In the UK we have complete the first round of the cardiovascular assessment programme, with all employees having been offered an appointment for a one to one assessment with a health technician. 61% of UK employees, including both office and field engineers, have taken up the option with 727 of these having been identified as “at risk” due to a measured indicator that falls outside the accepted healthy range. These employees where provided with advice for lifestyle modifications and where appropriate, referred to the GP for further advice. Of these “at risk” employees, 220 have been invited back for a review and targeted support.

4855 employees joined our 8-week global summer activity campaign; Shape Up National Grid Team Challenge, which led to the average participant recording a 6.2 pound weight reduction, 40 minutes of vigorous activity a week and an average of 8821 steps per day. Building upon this popular process a further 8-week campaign based upon improving diet and nutrition ran through the first 3 months of 2011, with 1682 employees taking part.

Soft Tissue Injury Prevention

The US has completed the roll out of the employee behaviour change training programme aimed at preventing musculoskeletal disorders. The programme this year has concentrated upon reinforcing the training and role of supervisors and first line managers in embedding the new ways of working with their teams.

Building on this US experience, the UK has two components to its soft tissue injury strategy; a behaviour change training programme based on the principles of body mechanics, and the introduction of a fast track physiotherapy and functional restoration rehabilitation process. To prove the effectiveness of this approach, we undertook a six month pilot of the rehabilitation process with our UK Gas Emergency teams. This rapid referral to work focused physio support produced a 280% Return On Investment, by enabling employees to return to work ahead of the expected time those employees would have taken off without this support. Now the success of this process has been established it will be extended to cover all operational field based staff in the UK from April 2011.

Mental Wellbeing and Stress Management

There has been a strong focus across the business to improve the way that we approach supporting and improving employees mental wellbeing. Our senior executives attended a 2-hour workshop in March 2011 looking at their leadership role in managing mental wellbeing within their teams.  New development throughout 2010 included :

• Refreshed internal global web site
• eLearning for employees
• eLearning for managers related to managing emotional wellbeing and building resilient teams
• 42 UK stress and resilience workshops run across 8 sites attracting 954 employees.
• General raising of awareness and promoting of above programmes.

Plans for next year include:

• Using the employee survey to map workplace pressure across the business
• Trial a pilot for fast track referrals to specialist psychological support and treatment for employees with identified conditions.