Source: theHRDIRECTOR
Date: Summer 2006

Heinz, the multi-national U.S. food company, has a worldclass portfolio of powerful brands holding number-one and number-two market positions in more than 50 countries.

The Kitt Green site in Wigan has many benefits and initiatives in place to help its 1,400 employees with their health and wellbeing. All staff have the opportunity to use the self-funded physiotherapists, on-site trained counsellors for face-to-face meetings, and there are two full-time on-site occupational health advisors. On top of this, all employees have access to an ethics hotline, as well as a fully structured harassment and bullying policy.

However, never before have they provided their employees with a fully subsidised PMI or cash plan benefit – and with sickness absence running at 4.7% per employee per year, the company decided that improvements needed to be made. Heinz approached HSA, a UK provider of health care plans and private medical insurance, to help tackle the issue and, as a result, the healthcare solution ‘WorkWell’ was introduced. Amongst other issues, the company wanted to target stress and felt the best way to do this was by giving staff access to a telephone based counselling service and fast access to medical services.

WorkWell addressed all of these issues, incorporating the valuable health benefits of consultation and diagnosis, as well as a fully funded Employee Assistance Programme, which includes face-to-face counselling and a 24-hour helpline.

Sharon Stevenson, HR manager says, “Our aim is to reduce our absenteeism figure to 4.4% over the coming year and we realised that we were unable to do this with the range of procedures and benefits we had in place. We have experienced a number of cases of long-term sickness absence greater than four weeks, with issues such as stress, anxiety, and muscular skeletal conditions being the main cause of absence.

“Our experience of absenteeism due to stress is that in the majority of cases, the illness is not often actually caused by work. Rather it is caused by financial, emotional, relationship or bereavement issues. However, it still impacts on work attendance as many employees feel they are unable to attend, due to stress levels."

“We have various procedures in place to help tackle this cause of absenteeism. For example, if an employee is off with stress, we will automatically arrange for an appointment to be made with an occupational health advisor, to help resolve the situation. Having a variety of benefits available allows our advisors to be flexible with the advice and options they give, because we know that different solutions suit different people. Through WorkWell, employees are able to use the helpline to speak to trained counsellors 24 hours a day, helping them with legal, tax, travel, medical and lifestyle issues as well as general counselling. We have found this to be the most common reason for using the helpline, with an average of 86% of calls being for general counselling advice. We have also arranged with HSA that if face-toface counselling is required, a meeting will be offered with our on-site counsellor, who is already aware of the working environment and the nature of issues that surround our employees’ working day, so there is no conflict between the different services we provide.”

Heinz is currently working with HSA to obtain statistics of the usage rates of the EAP as well as providing regular feedback on how absenteeism has reduced within the workforce, due to the effectiveness of the WorkWell benefits. Due to reasons of confidentiality, HSA are unable to provide specific details on this, but Heinz hopes that through constant liaison between the two parties, they will be able to use the information to understand ongoing or reoccurring employee problems and will be better able to address them.