Wellbeing: How one of NZ's oldest businesses responded to the COVID-19 pandemic

Peter Crawshaw, organisational development and wellbeing lead at DB Breweries, shares his practical insights around wellbeing in the workplace and how DB responded to the COVID-19 crisis.

The topic of mental health now permeates our professional and personal lives. Since 1929, DB has operated along the full end-to-end supply chain as part of the fastmoving consumer goods industry. With diverse people for diverse roles, we know one size does not fit all when it comes to wellbeing. Here at DB, workplace wellbeing is a key driver of engagement and performance. So to ensure a seat at the table, we added it to the portfolio of the organisational development lead’s role late in 2019, to acknowledge that a culture shift is the most challenging element to creating an environment centred on wellbeing.

Like many businesses, DB previously relied on the traditional approach to wellbeing – a calendar of flu shots, boot camps, yoga sessions and massages. While this approach still has its place, it was important to go beyond these wellness activities and reframe wellbeing into a more holistic and integrated approach, which was reaffirmed by internal surveys and focus groups. We believe this approach will translate into more engaged employees and a more productive workspace where everyone feels comfortable to bring their whole, authentic self to work.

It is vital to have the fundamentals of wellbeing in place. For us, this includes employee assistance programme EAPworks, accreditations such as the DV Free Tick, family support, and flexible work policies. Twenty years ago, we would have been well ahead of the curve to have this level of infrastructure. Today, most employees expect this level of support as standard, and we are constantly challenged to ensure we keep up with best practices.

For DB, the key aspects of this holistic approach are:

• to continuously build more inclusive leadership that ensures a culture of trust and psychological safety

• internal wellbeing to create a sense of belonging and meaning

• mental, emotional and physical wellbeing that is more pivotal than ever following the COVID-19 pandemic and recent national lockdown.

With a few simple tools, the natural ebbs and flows of life become more manageable.

A crucial part of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic was driving our foundation partnership with Mentemia – Italian for ‘my mind’. Co-founded by Sir John Kirwan, Mentemia is a pioneering organisational wellbeing initiative that focuses on equipping the Kiwi workforce with the tools people need to manage stress, anxiety and other mental health pressures. Mentemia acknowledges that wellbeing is a spectrum – some people struggle regularly, others don’t struggle at all, but many people fit between these extremes. With a few simple tools, the natural ebbs and flows of life become more manageable.

Mentemia involves a series of diagnostic workshops to ascertain how an organisation is performing at a baseline level. Where are the most significant areas of need? What are the pain points of our people? The next step is facilitated workshops to tackle these specific areas and begin helping people to build their own tailored daily mental health plans.

The most exciting part of Mentemia is a purpose-built app that houses a variety of resources, including an AI-powered digital mental health coach. Research shows people often struggle to open up face to face, particularly in a work environment. Our hope is that this digital feature will mean our employees feel comfortable and can receive the support they need from the app.

Following the lockdown announcement, we brought forward the release of the app to provide immediate support to our people’s wellbeing during the crisis period.

We also provided weekly wellbeing initiatives to all employees using the tools and resources from the app. Feedback from one of our graduates was:

“Mentemia is an easy to use and interactive app. I love that you are greeted with a message from JK at the start, and they give you a checklist of things to do when you first open it up. I have loved using the ‘Explore’ feature to find things to read, recipes, videos, and heaps more! It’s a simple app to navigate, which is great, especially because it’s a new app so you can’t just ask someone to teach you how to use it.”

We were also fortunate to have John Kirwan join two of our virtual weekly ‘town hall’-type sessions to talk about his experiences during lockdown and how he is coping, learning to adapt, and being resilient during these challenging times. The physical environment also has a tremendous impact on how people feel when they are at work. It affects collaboration, satisfaction and productivity.

We recently opened our on-site walking track around the stormwater lake at our Waitemata site in Otahuhu. It features beehives that produce ‘DBee Honey’, complete with local flora and fauna like kowhai and manuka, and birdlife like kingfisher, grey heron and welcome swallows. We encourage walking meetings around our sites and ask leaders to set the example and embrace the resources available for wellness at work.

During the national lockdown in response to COVID-19, we encouraged our teams to use video calls as a primary meeting platform to stay connected and to feel like they weren’t just speaking to a device. DB was in a unique position, with a split workforce to operate as an essential business. Office workers were at home, brewery staff were on-site, and merchandisers helped retail outlets with keeping product on the shelf. Our team took a peoplefirst approach to dealing with this challenge, and set a strong precedent that our leaders were focused on making this anxious and uncertain time as stress-free as possible for our people.

We ran an initiative where the leadership team and the functional leadership team contacted every employee in the organisation to check in on how their families were doing during the lockdown. This was very well received throughout the business and gave our people a sense of connection and belonging in a time of uncertainty. Our final reflection on embedding wellbeing into the workplace is that leadership endorsement is essential. The groundswell is there, employees expect businesses to be looking after their people, and leaders must respond. COVID-19 has highlighted how important looking after the wellbeing of our people is.

A Gartner study in 2018 found that the number-one retention strategy is to ensure people are more employable, and the link between wellbeing and discretionary effort is widely known. There is a clear business case for nurturing the wellbeing of your workforce and ensuring people can bring their whole, authentic self to the office, factory floor or road each day. For us, wellbeing is central to our people plan, and we know this is intimately linked to our performance as an organisation. We help our people to be well, so we can brew well.

Peter Crawshaw is organisational development and wellbeing lead at DB Breweries and has held HR roles with Heineken locally and at the Asia-Pacific office in Singapore.