A personal view from our Co-Chair Andrew Wilmot
In 2019 Kathy Heath and myself were both colleagues in the trade association IMA Europe which advocates the use of incentives, staff engagement, and rewards. Many employee benefit and rewards managers were picking up the mantel of ‘Employee Wellbeing’ and this created an opportunity for the members of the IMA to expand business activities. As well as being a Portfolio CTO in the incentives industry I was also delivering wellbeing programmes based on Transcendental Meditation within businesses. I’ve been a certified TM Teacher for many years. Kathy Heath who I knew from her time at Citi and Wirecard had started a mental health consultancy called Generation Heath Minds whilst also being a leader within the payments industry.
One evening Kathy and myself met at the Hilton near Euston station to compare notes. We both felt that wellbeing programmes in industry were then more of a ‘tick in the box’ type of effort and that providers of wellbeing services should form some kind of association to work together to improve the quality of service and delivery into workplaces.
After many months of discussion within the IMA, in March 2020 it was decided that it would be valuable if an association could be developed not as part of IMA but as a strategic partner. Then the world was hit with COVID and that delayed plans but concerns about the pandemic, and long COVID meant that the association more than ever should be put in place.
January 2021 we met with Varsha Khatri an experienced nutritionist, Ayurvedic Consultant and well qualified health educator who Andrew knew through mutual friends. They met also with Angela Steel, who was CEO of SuperWellness a successful workplace wellbeing company who had been a judge at the 2020 Incentive Awards. Andrew had also been working with one of the leaders of the Transcendental Meditation Organisation Mark Heath on business projects. In January this group started meeting very week.
In April 21 we called a meeting though the IMA and Wellbeing LinkedIn Groups and a group of 20 came together to discuss “Do we need a new Workplace Wellbeing” Association. There were NHS clinicians, GPs, Wellbeing Consultants and Employee Engagement specialists.
The outcome of the meeting was a resounding response that something new is needed. The view was that it should be charitable, and should focus on the following 3 things: Strategy, Delivery & Measurement. It was felt there was a strong need for this in the market.
We formed a board of management of four of us and a wider board of advisors. In July we were joined by 4 top measurement experts for our second webinar on Measurement – we had over 25 people attend, and yet again there was very positive feedback.
Our board met through the summer at the WeWork in Liverpool Street and were sustained by the local Cinnamon Kitchen.
In September we had a joint webinar in September 21 with the IMA and we had over 80 people attend from across EMEA. So the support is very much there.
With our website now live, we are building our board of advisors and we are absolutely convinced that that something more was needed in this area. We need a non-profit with a non-profit ethos. We are focusing on persuading employers to implement real strategic programmes, with a good quality of delivery and excellent measurement processes. Also, we feel there is a need to focus on prevention, personal development and performance improvement and to build an evidence base to show employers that wellbeing boosts profitability.
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