With staff costs typically accounting for about 90% of a company’s overall operating costs, we know that investing in features that improve health and productivity of employees makes good business sense. We therefore design and manage our assets to enhance our customers’ and our colleagues’ physical and mental wellbeing, supporting their productivity. 

It has never been so important that the air in our buildings is high quality. In 2021 we signed up to the WELL Portfolio Programme to ensure we provide a healthy and safe environment for our office customers to return to. Monitoring and raising awareness around air quality is a fundamental part of this and so this year we undertook a four-month indoor air-quality testing programme in 16 of our buildings. The results showed very high levels of air quality across our spaces. Following this testing, we are now introducing sensors across our entire portfolio.
We have a dedicated intranet site for all colleagues to access a suite of resources covering physical, psychological and social aspects that contribute to a healthy life.

We’ve also formalised our approach to improving wellbeing by registering and assessing our live development schemes against the WELL Building Standard. This was a natural step as we have embedded health and wellbeing principles into our projects for a number of years. At Dashwood, we’ve also experimented with the WELL standard in our office products Blank Canvas, Customised and Myo, creating three wellness offerings to suit our customers’ needs. For Blank Canvas, we are aiming to ensure any tenant can achieve a WELL Core certification if they wish. For Customised, we’ve created a specific WELL fit-out option for customers, including a handbook imparting the knowledge we have acquired over the years to help them fulfil their own wellness aspirations. For Myo, we are hoping to be the first flexible office space in the City to achieve full WELL certification.

Supporting the wellbeing of our people 

During the Covid-19 pandemic we also ensured that our people had access to information about how they can get support. We also continue to encourage individuals to focus on their physical and mental health and continue to train our mental-health first aiders. We have 18 trained individuals around the business to provide advice or a ‘listening ear’. 

We have created an information hub where people have easy information about, and access to, all our support including our employee assistance programme, our virtual GP, access to our external occupational health team, apps providing support including Unmind and Peppy Healthcare, and a wealth of external sources recommended by our networks, including documentaries, apps, webinars, podcasts and books.

We have also been leveraging our partnerships by passing on free gym sessions, posture masterclasses and sharing useful guides around pensions and financial wellbeing to equip our people as the cost-of-living increases start to impact. We have also given our employees access to the Peppy Health App which focuses on three key areas; fertility, new baby and menopause.

Our 100 Victoria Street workplace

Our award-winning workplace is designed for activity-based working and taught us the importance of designing for wellbeing and the effect it has on occupiers. We curated the physical space, workplace services and employee benefits to remove the barriers to an active, healthy and productive working day.

Promoting healthy lifestyles

• Our employee benefits promote healthy lifestyles and include discounted gym membership, on-site yoga classes, free breakfasts and healthy snacks throughout the day
• Our employees can chat with a GP through a new healthcare app, and we’ve trained mental health first aiders throughout the workplace
• The workplace has an LED circadian lighting system which matches external light levels, and white noise machines to create a sense of privacy
• The way we ventilate and clean our space is tightly controlled to keep the air free from chemicals.

Supporting activity-based working

• Our new ways of working have increased productivity by giving our employees the tools and the spaces to do their job in the most appropriate way for the task at hand.
• Our workplace has over 700 places to work from sit-stand and treadmill desks to quiet working booths and library spaces.