Health and productivity
Wood recognises that having a healthy workforce is good not only for its people and business, but also for the communities in which it operates.
Having a healthy workforce means promoting and supporting all aspects of wellbeing whether physical, emotional, financial, social, environmental or career, to enable better work and balanced working lives.
Creating a healthy work environment can support employee engagement, improved performance and productivity. It also contributes to a reduction in sickness-related absence.
Creating balance
A full-time employee spends as much as 38% of their weekday at work, meaning the workplace can have either a positive or negative impact on their physical and mental health.
Protecting an employee from exposure to workplace hazards including psychosocial ones, as well as providing supportive activities to manage ill health and injury, helps to deliver the best possible outcome for all.
Wood recognises that putting in place the right measures to enable a positive integration between work and personal life allows our people to flourish and reach their full potential. This mutually benefits the business.
Focused on wellbeing
Caring for our people is one of our core values. This commitment drives our ongoing focus to apply the best available approaches to mental health and wellbeing to benefit our whole Wood community.
This support starts with our Executive Leadership Team.
"In a fast-changing and, in many cases, challenging world, it is not difficult to understand how someone can find themselves in a dark place, psychologically. As an industry we’ve made good progress in mental health support, but it’s never been clearer that we need to do more. I feel passionate about health and wellbeing and will continue to advocate for initiatives and training that deliver key messages and signpost support for our people.
"It is vital that we maintain momentum in this journey as we continue to invest in resources, equip our people and proactively engage in challenging conversations."
Craig Shanaghey
Executive President, Projects
How is this fundamental to our business
Wood relies upon a healthy workforce to deliver the solutions we bring to our clients. From consulting services to global site operations and large-scale projects, the landscape of working at Wood varies across the disciplines we work in, as does the risk of ill health or injury to our people.
As a service provider, in many instances we operate under limited operational control. Working with our clients, we seek to deliver a standard of care for our people that meets not only our own, but globally recognised standards on occupational health and wellbeing.
Recognising the human rights risks related to our operations, in particular our use of third-party suppliers and transient workers, we place a focus on worker welfare and the wider human rights agenda, as a material issue to Wood as part of our sustainability strategy.
Meeting the needs of our employees, helps to avoid workplace problems that without a focus on health and wellbeing may give rise to performance and productivity issues, as well as our ability to maintain a culture of care, and our ability to attract and retain our most vital resource – our people.
The health and wellbeing of Wood employees is at the heart of our values and is driven by our HSSE policy which commits to both caring for our people, as well as preventing ill-health and injury. Our HSSE policy is supported by Wood’s Global Health Protection Standards, which drives continuous improvement in our occupational health and wellbeing performance and is aligned to internationally recognised standards of practise with ISO 18001 and 45001 certifications in place across the business.
Guidance, training and self-assessment tools are made available to the business, to aid the implementation of our standards and approach to health protection.
Seeking to continually improve worker welfare, Wood is a founding member of the business led initiative Building Responsibly. Including a focus on health and wellbeing, our focus on worker welfare seeks to address fundamental worker rights in collaboration with our clients, industry, and civil society.
Learn more about Building Responsibly and our work on worker welfare on our human rights page.
In 2021, Wood announced two sustainability goals focused on our work to embed the 10 worker welfare principles of Building Responsibly across our supply base, of which principles 5 and 6 talk directly to ensuring work and living conditions are safe and healthy.
View the Building Responsibly home page.
Our Health and Wellbeing plan
Health Protection at Wood focuses on both health and wellbeing by:
- Reducing the impact of work through effective management of workplace health hazards
- Understanding the employee, to reduce the impact work may have on declared underlying health condition
- Encouraging and supporting general wellbeing
Together our HSSES and Health Protection standards apply a holistic approach to preventing workplace ill health and supporting global employee wellbeing. Through the provision of training and awareness, we place a focus on the early identification of health hazards including psychosocial ones.
We ensure appropriate measures are in place to provide our people with the skills and knowledge to create a healthy working environment and to help Wood to deliver a sustainable impact on the health and wellbeing of our workforce.
Wood has an established Living Well at Wood programme which continues to grow in popularity, supported by our Wellbeing Community of Practice whose job functions specifically relate to the implementation of the programme, our global Wellbeing Network who directly contribute to the design of the programme and our wellbeing champions distributed across all locations in Wood. The programme provides tools and resources in the framework pillars of physical, emotional, financial, career, environmental and social wellbeing.
One programme activity that has been hugely successful is ‘Around Wood in 30 days. To mark Wood’s Health Protection Week and World Health Day, we annually challenge ourselves to virtually travel around the world in 30 days, ‘stopping off’ in countries where Wood is present along the way. Every year since its inception it has grown in popularity, with more teams taking part, more activities being shared and showcasing at its best the supportive and social wellbeing present at Wood.
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We also recognise and support World Health Organisation Awareness Days, particularly those that focus on topics applicable to our operations, such as malaria, hepatitis, tuberculosis, mental health and HIV.
Our global wellbeing champions network helps to promote these awareness days throughout the business and allows effective communication on key messages, particularly on supporting mental wellness and conveying vital information around the risk of employees acquiring and spreading illnesses, and how this can be minimised.
Wood have also increasingly been collaborating with other industry organisations to help raise the importance of these Awareness Days with Wood’s CEO speaking at the World’s Biggest Mental Heatlh Check In.
Managing our Mental Health
Mentally healthy workplaces prevent harm by managing their psychological risks; they promote the positive aspects of work as well as positive mental health. They also protect the wellbeing of their staff and support those who have a mental health condition.
In a mentally healthy workplace, everyone has responsibilities towards mental health, and everyone contributes to the culture which is free of stigma and discrimination and where people feel safe to talk about their mental health.
Wood’s global Mental Wellness Plan, a six-point approach to mental health management, enables a business-wide approach to creating a mentally healthy contributing to Wood’s sustainability aspirations and contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Good Health and Wellbeing.
Our Mental Wellness Plan aspires to create a supportive and inclusive culture that acknowledges the positive contribution that mental wellness has on creating the conditions necessary for the pursuit of personal and professional success and wellbeing.
We seek to support the Education of our people on the importance of mental health, not just related to a disability or illness, instead recognising this represents a continuum in which we all live and experience fluctuating levels throughout our lives.
Specifically designed training continues to be rolled out to line managers and supervisors to not only enable better recognition and allow for earlier intervention and support, but also really look at how we can address the factors that may contribute to poor mental health.
Reducing stigma about mental health creates an environment where we all feel safe to talk about our mental health at work and empowers us to seek support which will not only benefit ourselves but our families, workplaces and communities too.
Training for everyone remains a focus too in support of our inspired culture where mental health stigma is consistently challenged and reduced; while our global Wellbeing Champions are provided regular training sessions to help them fulfil their role.
Delivery of the plan is reported monthly to the ELT and quarterly to the Board. This includes attendance reports of training including percentage trained as well as, where data is available, the impact of the plan on mental health absences too.
An example of our commitment to supporting mental health in the workplace can be seen in the IADC North Sea Charter. This charter has been created by the energy industry for the industry in response to the groundswell of support to improve awareness and support of the mental health and well-being of the people who work offshore and onshore. Instigated by the North Sea Chapter of the International Association of Drilling Contractors (IADC), it includes contributions from almost 200 representatives from operators, contractors, psychologists, and third sector organisations. Wood is proud to be one of these representatives and a copy of the IADC Mental Health & Wellbeing Charter can be found here.
Continued care
Caring for our people, remains our number one priority. The implementation of our flexible working policy has further enhanced our ability to offer our people a better work life balance. However, in turn this also presents an additional health related risk around isolation and poor mental health, requiring additional measures to prevent serious harm.
In response, we accelerated the implementation of company-wide wellbeing resources, including a global Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) service, mental health library and line managers guides to improving mental health for employees.
Access to mental health support has also now been extended to all Wood families through the EAP in recognition of the need to support the whole family to ensure the health and wellbeing of our people.
We have additionally recognised the need to include mental health as part of the entire career lifecycle with the use of adjustments during the recruitment process, ongoing provision of reasonable adjustments for those suffering from poor mental health but also including regular discussion on mental health and wellbeing as part of performance development and review process.
All help enhance the good work principles that support workplace health at Wood.