iris Takes Home Gold for Best Healthcare and Wellbeing at 2017 Employee Benefits Awards

Creative agency iris has taken home Gold for Best Healthcare and Wellbeing at the 2017 Employee Benefits Awards. This category celebrates the most effective healthcare and wellbeing strategy for employers with under 1,000 staff.

iris continues to develop its health and wellbeing programme, Well Fit Iris, in order to ensure its employees have the best experience possible at work, putting their health at the centre of this aim. 

The programme includes a comprehensive range of benefits, including private medical insurance (PMI), free financial advice, behaviour change workshops, sleep school, an iris recipe book, and cycle safety, among others. 

The organisation has a dedicated on-site wellness director, Rebecca Cox, who is a qualified personal trainer and nutritionist. Employees have a one-to-one lifestyle planning session with the wellness director, looking at areas such as sleep, stresses, and diet. This forms the basis of a bespoke wellness strategy for each staff member and allows employees to see how the benefits on offer at Iris can help them to achieve their lifestyle goals. 

In addition, the organisation organises an annual charity initiative that encourages staff to work together to achieve a goal and improve their activity levels. One initiative saw employees walk or run the distance between the UK and the Philippines on treadmills over a two-week period in order to raise funds for those affected by natural disasters in the country.

The judges were impressed by the organisation’s robust and tailored approach to health and wellbeing, and the results it achieved. This includes a 25% reduction in absenteeism and a 23% reduction in presenteeism, as well as improvements in attrition rates, employee satisfaction levels, and engagement with benefits.

The judges said: “The organisation clearly put significant investment into the programme and the range of measures that it used to evidence the output was strong. It’s a bespoke approach focused on individual needs, with tangible results in terms of the impact it had, with positives for the organisation as well as the individuals. The commitment to having a dedicated wellbeing director shows how seriously it takes the health and wellbeing of its employees.”

Rebecca Cox, wellbeing director at iris and winner of the award, said: “We really commit to this more than any other of our benefits right now because we understand that we’ve got quite a young workforce and to keep them fit and well is the best thing we can do in terms of keeping them happy and productive at work. We’ve focused 100% on it and that’s made a difference.”