Avoiding the ‘office blues’: How we’re managing emotional needs in the workplace

While we’re often told to “bring your whole selves to work”, managing emotional wellbeing is still an ongoing challenge for many employees. 

This is where Asteron Life is stepping up to the plate, with a new pilot programme we’ve crafted to support our claims team who regularly undertake challenging conversations with customers as part of their work. 

A bespoke programme with wellbeing at the forefront

The programme offers our case managers and customer support employees the ability to attend resilience workshops, mentoring and individual training as well as monitoring to help them in their emotionally challenging roles. 

In the same way that our customers are often in need of emotional support, our claims team members who interact with customers can genuinely benefit from additional skills, tools, and support to assist them with their own mental and physical wellbeing. 

This pilot programme is also designed to give customer claims handlers the opportunity to reflect on their case management and continually improve their approach to help manage work-related stress and alert the business to potential risks that may otherwise go unnoticed. 

Why we’re prioritising wellbeing

The work our teams do daily to support customers is recognised as having challenging impacts on their physical and emotional health. Vicarious, or secondary trauma, can occur as a result of their work helping others cope with traumatic events, reviewing distressing information and learning of serious injuries or in some cases death.

This kind of secondary trauma can have quite a negative impact on our people, and we’re optimistic that exposure to the professional practices, skills and support that will be delivered through this pilot programme will go some way towards mitigating these impacts.

Building resilience among our people

Our Claims and Customer Solutions Manager, Jo Unuka has extensive experience assisting customers who are off work due to a period of sickness or injury and it’s through interactions with these customers that he’s experienced first-hand the impact this work can have on an employee’s wellbeing. 

“This pilot programme aims to help our teams build their resilience to continue being able to be their best, both in and out of work.  

“Having external qualified support to help me work through a tricky situation or cope with an interaction that is confronting has allowed me to learn new strategies to better equip me for the next time I find myself in a similar situation. The sessions have had a significant positive impact on me and make me feel more supported by my employer.”  

Looking to the future

We’re aiming to run this wellbeing pilot programme for 4 months and this backs up a suite of other employee support that we offer, including online learning programmes, our Employee Assistance Programme sessions and existing training modules focused on building the psychological health and wellbeing of our team members. 

Following a review of the benefits and impact, we’re optimistic that we may be able to look to extend this pilot to other areas of our business.