Mental Health Awareness Week: UKEXA '23 Award-Winning Story

Mental Health Awareness Week, observed from May 13 to May 19 across the UK, serves as a crucial reminder of the importance of mental wellbeing in our lives.

Overall mental health can be impacted by work and the wellbeing that is established in the workplace can really impact your commitment to work and productivity. Wellbeing at work is an area that's increasingly being recognised and prioritised by employers and organisations. One of them is Bidfood UK , one of the UK’s leading food service providers, whose mission is to build and maintain customer relationships while creating a great place to work for their people.

Bidfood took home a gold award in Health and Wellbeing category, at the UK Employee Experience Awards 2023, which was the testament to the hard work and dedication of their fantastic team. The judges said that their submission was interesting and inspiring to read, with clear goals and objectives and impressive improvements scores.

Bidfood’s dedicated Health and Wellbeing strategy highlights the importance of looking after wellbeing to help make sure their people are healthy, happy and motivated to be at their best and thrive in a business that really cares. They recognised that more needed to be done to support the employees, so established a health and wellbeing (H&W) steering group to scope their requirements. Bidfood listened to all their employees to help shape a strategy for the next few years. What they found was invaluable, and soon created their vision “to positively impact their people by being committed to their wellbeing, helping both them and the business to be at their best”.

Bidfood has been hard at work on achieving that vision by introducing new resources and initiatives, including: a one-stop-shop guide of H&W information, mental health (MH) training for managers, a menopause wellbeing group, an early-wage-access scheme, men’s health stories from senior managers, onsite physiotherapy, and physical activity competitions.

This year’s Mental Health Awareness theme of "Movement: Moving More for Our Mental Health", encourages people to take small positive actions in order to better themselves and their mental state. Everyone can get the mental health benefits of moving more - it’s all about finding what works for you. Whilst these steps may be small, cumulatively it can have a profound effect on reducing stress and can offer significant improvements in mental health over time as you focus on taking time out to do the things you enjoy.