He started by saying that Deloitte are delighted to sponsor World WellBeing At Work Week 2022.
“As with many organisations Deloitte has experienced profound change over the past few years, operating in the challenging environment of the pandemic and adopting new ways of working at pace. A critical part of our values is to take care of each other. Deloitte’s culture is grounded in the understanding that ‘we are all in this together’. We look out for one another and prioritise respect, fairness, development and wellbeing. In our recent ‘Engage for Change’ staff survey conducted across our UK, Islands and Gibraltar offices, wellbeing was identified by our people as one of the top five areas of focus.
“Our ongoing aim is to make our Jersey office an inclusive, open and supportive environment for our people. We want our staff to feel confident bringing their full selves to work every day and feel that they are supported in achieving their goals and ambitions. We prioritise our staff’s physical and mental wellbeing alongside their responsibilities. Wellbeing is a journey for all employers and there’s unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all answer. We thought it would be helpful to share some examples of initiatives we have tried and believe our people have enjoyed.
“It’s important to us to make sure that we offer a variety of activities for our people to try that focus on physical and mental wellbeing. As examples, we offer a regular yoga class alongside our many sporting activities we participate in as a team, the opportunity for staff to have a relaxing massage at work, and recently we organised an evening activity making candles.
“Our Jersey office continues to grow significantly, and we have a very diverse team encompassing a range of different cultures and backgrounds. It’s fantastic celebrating this diversity with our people; recently we’ve held events for Nigerian Independence Day and Diwali. At our manager strategy session, we enjoyed having the opportunity to learn a phrase from a colleague in a new language and have now introduced a ‘Word of the Month’ across the whole office to continue this.
“We’ve frequently heard that charitable and community activities are important to our teams. We have a partnership with Every Child our Future in the Channel Islands, giving our people the opportunity to get involved in numeracy activities in local primary schools. Recently we made a significant financial donation to ECOF, as well as a donation of laptops to show our continued support for the work they are doing with the island’s school children
“We endeavour to ensure that our team and office social events are inclusive so that there is something on offer for everyone. Any opportunity for healthy competition appears to be particularly popular. We’ve recently held an evening of video and board games in the office and are hosting a table-tennis tournament to raise money for our charity partner.
“The early part of the year is an extremely busy time for our colleagues, working on several projects with our clients. We will be running an internal wellbeing week in January, focused on giving our people activities and strategies to take care of both their physical and mental Wellbeing throughout the upcoming months.
“As a large business, Deloitte offers a wide range of benefits to employees and in recent years this has been particularly expanded to include health and lifestyle benefits. For example, from January the firm will offer company funded private medical insurance to all employees. We want to make sure all our people use the benefits on offer in a way that suits them best. An example of this is allowing staff to take public/bank holidays on a different day if that is more meaningful to them.
“We believe that a clear focus on wellbeing is hugely important to our ability to attract and retain talented people. We look forward to continuing to invest in this area as we grow and develop our Jersey office, and our Islands business as a whole.”
