An Introduction to We Are Wellbeing for Romero Insurance Clients

2. What’s We Are Wellbeing’s history and what are the main services We Are Wellbeing provides?

“Seeing what other organisation had done, having worked in workplace wellbeing for 8 years; in January 2020 I thought let’s have a new start and do wellbeing differently to how I’d done it before, on a bigger scale but really authentically. I decided to set up a new business – I asked my wife what I should call it, and together we called it We Are Wellbeing.

The intention of the business was to support Romero Insurance Brokers’ clients, but the business plan blew up in smoke because the pandemic hit. Three months in, COVID ruined every plan we had, but it also brought opportunity. Over-night we had to convert all our content into online content, even though before March 2020 I’d never delivered a webinar. Instead of just servicing organisations local to us here in Leeds, quickly we were delivering to companies in America, in Africa, and all of Europe, so it escalated quite quickly.

As an organisation we specialise in two main areas. One is wellbeing education: workshops, training courses and seminars. And the other is health screening: This involves going into businesses and delivering 1-2-1 health checks. We screen employees at all levels, all the way up to directors.

All of our training courses are CPD credited. That means we get your team to a certain standard, a certain level of education, therefore there are learning outcomes and objectives we are trying to achieve. Our training courses are built to help and support organisations – that starts with managers. We train line managers on how to look after the wellbeing of their team. Most managers become managers because they are good at what they did, not because they are great leaders or are good at having sensitive conversations – this makes a massive difference for an employee’s personal wellbeing. One of our key training courses is how to support managers in looking after their team, providing them with better tools and resources to become better leaders.

Wellbeing Champions, our other training course, is about having health and wellbeing champions in your organisation to support their colleagues. If somebody is struggling at work, they are much more likely to speak to a colleague, and if that colleague has had some baseline training on how to support somebody, it goes a long way.

We also have wellbeing workshops, which are usually half a day. They are an amalgamation of three subjects that complement each other; such topics as sleep, energy nutrition, stress, awareness, mental health, illness. We bundle three together to give people a really good interactive experience.

Our seminars are one-hour delivered in person, or our webinars are one hour and delivered online. We’ve got over fifty different subjects, and all of these subjects have been created by hand alongside experts who support us.”

4. What is a corporate health screening?

“Another side to our business is health screening. A health screening involves us going into another organisation and providing employees with the opportunity to sit down with a health and wellbeing expert. They could have a ten minute healthy-heart check or an essential thirty minute check, and experience their key health metrics – be it blood pressure or heart rate or cholesterol glucose levels.

The main objective is to talk about how they are feeling about their health. The main value is health observations; one of the key identifiers about someone’s health is to learn what they have observed – what has changed recently that wasn’t there before.

Most people don’t get this opportunity. Perhaps they sit down with their GP, if they can even get in with their GP. For us, being able to sit down with employees and have a chat is really valuable, in addition to the screening.”

6. Where do businesses start when wanting to improve their employee welfare?

“When organisations start working with us one of the first things we recommend is to undergo a wellbeing insights survey. The wellbeing insights survey is a 30-35 question survey that we provide digitally, it can be completed on any device. We’ll provide this as a free service, and provides us with the information that can be quite hard to attain.

We want to hear form employees, as well as your HR directors and managers, on what the needs and wants of your business are. This survey will provide us insight into sleep habits of your people, their mental health, their stresses, and more. We’ll then packages the results and send you a detailed report about what is happening within your business.

We’ll repeat the survey every single year to see what has changed. Businesses want to know what the return on investment is when spending on wellbeing, and the survey is excellent for us to be able to demonstrate the progress.”

8. What are the size and scale of the businesses you service?

“It varies. Over time we’ve worked with huge organisations such as Nestle, Siemens and Moto service stations, as well as international organisations such as London Zoo. We’ve also worked with some really small organisations like St. Gemma’s Hospice in Leeds; we work with schools and universities.

The one thing they’ve all got in common is they want to support people. It doesn’t matter about the size of the organisation, it just matters about the people.”

10. What is the We Are Wellbeing App?

“The We Are Wellbeing App was originally designed to support Romero Insurance Brokers with their on site wellbeing provisions. The app allows businesses to register all their employees, where staff will have the ability to book on-site services with any of our team members.

We now offer on-site counselling, psycho-therapy, hypnosis, massages, health checks, physio therapy, and doctor consultations. Allowing us onsite to deliver these services enable wellbeing to happen at a much bigger scale. It’s also much more effective – staff aren’t having to take time off to go to the doctors, instead everything is on-site.

So if organisations are wanting support with wellbeing services and access, the We Are Wellbeing app is a great resource now available.”