Promoting the health, wellbeing & development of our colleagues
At Gattaca, we believe that our most valuable asset is our team of talented and dedicated colleagues.
Our goal is to create a thriving work environment that fosters the health, wellbeing and continuous development of every individual within our organisation. We are confident that our commitment to promoting these principles will not only lead to a happier and more engaged workforce, but also fuel our organisation’s success and create a positive impact on our peoples’ lives.
Focus Areas
Promote & support colleague mental, physical, financial & social wellbeing
Our Mental Health First Aiders
We are seeing real progress in removing the stigma that is often associated with mental health, with colleagues feeling able to ask for support sooner.
Today, there are 19 within our Mental Health and Wellbeing team, including 16 qualified Mental Health First Aiders. Their purpose is to implement and embed positive change, as well as promote and advocate a safe and well-informed support system via a range of initiatives and projects which work towards achieving our wellbeing objectives.
Meet some of Gattaca’s Mental Health First Aiders!
As an example of our wellbeing strategy in action, to mark Mental Health Awareness Day, Dan Harrington (Talent Acquisition Consultant) stepped out of his comfort zone to share his own mental health experiences with his colleagues and community.
His story created positive dialogue across the business and resulted in increased Mental Health First Aider applications.
Words from our colleagues
Enable and encourage the continuous development of our people
Our learning and development strategy is designed to elevate our capabilities within STEM industries. Our dedicated learning and development team enables our colleagues to acquire the new skills, knowledge and competencies to improve their individual and our collective performance.
Our development offering is a mixture of face-to-face events, one to one coaching, as well as e-learning & remote learning opportunities that can be accessed anywhere. Through global offerings such as our mentoring scheme, executive coaching, high performance coaching and call coaching, we hope to promote a self-driven learning culture where everyone, regardless of role or location, is able to thrive.
Targets
Our priority target to help us promote the health, wellbeing & development of our colleagues is:
To introduce early recognition of the need for health & wellbeing support, access to internal & external assistance.
Highlights FY23
- Trained an additional 14 mental health first aiders taking total to 20
- Awarded a place on the Staffing Industry Analysts “Best Staffing Firms to Work For” list 2022 based on feedback from employees
- Company-wide employee engagement score raised from 7.6 to 8.1
- 388 Exec Coaching hours
- 3 Guest speakers
- 235 management & leadership training hours
- 6765 total hours of training & coaching
- 360 review programmes
Next steps
- Our current offering is significant; spanning the areas of mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing. Over FY24 we want to focus on how we can better embed our offering within the business to improve accessibility and take-up.
- We also want to continue the focus on enhancing our mental health provision, specifically upskilling our management community in mental health awareness; enabling them to recognise the early signs of mental ill-health, initiate conversations and signpost our offering.
We are inspired by our colleagues’ lived experiences and dedicated to providing a safe and supported working environment.
We’re committed to encouraging and improving mental health support and awareness through our wider Wellbeing strategy. As an example of our wellbeing strategies in action, to mark Mental Health Awareness Day, Dan Harrington stepped out of his comfort zone to share with his colleagues and community that he is living with mental illness. Dan shared to the whole company that he was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in 2013 and with High Functioning Autism in 2021.
The revelation – which Dan had anticipated would feel like opening the floodgates to comments and judgements – has, by his own admission, been quite the opposite:
Dan Harrington
‘’The response was absolutely incredible, managers and colleagues were extremely supportive, one person even said that it inspired them to reach out to their manager about their own mental health and get support structures in place, that was really great to hear’’
“Businesses don’t have these resources just to tick boxes – I told my story because I really want to encourage people to use the tools available to them. It might seem scary at first, but since I opened up about my own struggles it’s like a weight has been lifted. My colleagues understand me better, my manager and I have a closer relationship and I’m more excited about the future than ever before.”