Tag Archives: Workplace

Acas Urges UK Businesses To Tackle Mental Health In The Downturn

Acas, the employment relations service, is encouraging UK businesses and managers to prepare for the longer term effects of the recession and implement policies and procedures to help cope with mental health issues in the workplace.

In a recently published policy discussion paper, Acas looks at some of the lessons that can be learnt from tackling workplace stress. It advises business and managers to look at how they can anticipate and identify mental health problems in the workplace and what steps should be taken to respond to them.

Figures show that mental health problems cost UK organisations around £26 billion each year*. The latest figures also reveal that the total number of unemployed has now reached 2.47 million**, which could have a further adverse impact on employees’ wellbeing.

Ed Sweeney, Acas Chairman, said: “The economy may hopefully have seen the worst of the recession but the impact on workplaces will be felt far into the future.

“Implementing procedures to effectively deal with mental health issues in the workplace has strong benefits for individuals and organisations. Early intervention can play a critical part in reducing the problem of ill health at work and this ‘prevention over cure’ approach will ultimately help businesses and employees save time, stress and money.”

Measuring the impact of the recession on employees’ mental wellbeing can be difficult as the stigma associated with mental health creates barriers to measuring the true extent of the problem.

Acas is urging organisations and managers to implement effective policies and procedures to help managers deal with the long term impacts of the downturn and safeguard the health and wellbeing of employees. This might include:

– workplace training – to raise awareness of stress and
mental health so that line managers, in particular, can tell if an employee is
suffering from additional or excessive pressures

– Good interpersonal skills – to help nurture trusting relationships with staff who
may be anxious about disclosing their mental health problems

– A supportive organisational structure – that guides managers by providing clear
policies and procedures for managing mental health

Via EPR Network
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WeInterpret.Net, Sign Language Interpreting Agency, Hires Bi-Lingual Administrative Assistant

WeInterpret.Net has hired a bi-lingual (Spanish/English) administrative assistant in order to meet the growing demands of its current customers. Many of the current contracts allow for additional languages to be added without requiring re-negotiation. 

WeInterpret.NetWeInterpret is opening an office in New Mexico and will support the needs of that office by having administrative positions in Maryland. The call center which allows Deaf and Hard of hearing to communicate with their hearing coworkers and customers through Video Interpreting from a remote location has an occasional need for Spanish/English service. The position of administrative assistant will also be able to answer and interpret these bi-lingual calls when needed.

Providing Sign Language Interpreters for communication between Deaf and hearing persons is a requirement of any business under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA 1990). While there are no specific mandates for interpreters of other languages, WeInterpret recognizes that many companies desire to provide this service to increase their customer base. “Witnessing the communication challenges my parents have faced has inspired me to be available to assist others in the community by providing interpreting services,” states Luis Gonzales, Administrative Assistant, WeInterpret.Net.

About WeInterpret.Net
Maryland Interpreting Services, a Maryland corporation doing business as WeInterpret.Net and WeInterpretLinked was established in 1996. Owner and President, David Stephenson is a nationally certified interpreter. Since its establishment, it has provided some 6 million hours of interpreting services to some 900 customers through offices in Utah, Virginia, Maryland and New Mexico. Staff Interpreters and Independent Sub-Contractors numbering over 1000 provide On-Site (www.WeInterpret.Net) and Video Remote Interpreting. (www.WeInterpretLinked.com)

About Spanish/English Interpreting
An interpreter works with spoken or signed language. A translator works with written language, rewriting documents in a target language which is often the translator’s native language. The jobs are actually quite different. A translator may not even be completely bilingual as resources are available to assist in the translation given a time deadline. An interpreter must be able to instantaneously translate verbally between the two languages. Interpreters are in an ever-increasing demand to meet the needs of the global and domestic market place.

Via EPR Network
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Lighterlife Has Achieved ‘First Class Star Status’ With The Best Companies Accreditation 2009 Project, After Demonstrating Healthy Work Practices And High Levels Of Employee Care

LighterLife, Harlow based weight-loss company, has achieved ‘First Class Star Status’ with the Best Companies Accreditation 2009 project, after demonstrating healthy work practices and high levels of employee care.

Best Companies Accreditation has been established to acknowledge excellence in the workplace and the great leadership skills, strong company values and positive impact a company has on the local community. These areas were highlighted as areas of excellence for LighterLife.

Staff comments included, “My organisation makes a positive difference to the world we live in”, “I am excited about where this organisation is going” and “This organisation is run on strong values/principles”.

Based on staff feedback the Michelin style elite accreditation system rates organisations on leadership, management, personal growth, wellbeing, the extent to which employees feel their organisation has a positive impact on society, employee’s feelings towards their immediate colleagues, levels of engagement and pay and benefits.

Already exceeding all criteria of the Investors In People Standard, LighterLife entered the Best Companies Accreditation project to be benchmarked against other businesses and it is considered exceptional for a first time entrant to be awarded star status. LighterLife will also be featured in the Best Companies Guide, an annual reference guide that provides independent and unbiased information on some of the UK’s best workplaces.

LighterLife aims to help people with weight loss to get them out of the obesity danger zone and reach a healthy weight, whilst at the same time working towards creating a healthy attitude, healthy work practices and a healthy company.

Commenting on the accreditation, Octavia Morley, Chief Executive Officer, said “There is no better way of testing the health of your company than by providing your staff a confidential opportunity to tell it how it is. It provides staff with an opportunity to appraise the company they work for and offers us real and usable insight into the areas which we need to develop further. We have always thought LighterLife is a great company to work for, but it is fantastic to have this validated”.

About LighterLife
LighterLife is a weight-loss and weight-management programme for people who are one stone or more overweight and with a BMI of 25 or above. Over 100,000 people have successfully lost weight with LighterLife since 1996. The unique LighterLife approach offers specific overweight and clinically obese weight loss programmes in the form of diets using nutritionally complete soups, shakes and bars combined with specialised counselling using cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and transactional analysis (TA) techniques. Clients benefit not only from rapid, safe weight loss but they also learn the behavioural changes needed to sustain it. Founded in 1996, the LighterLife Programme was developed by three of its directors – Jackie Cox, Bar Hewlett and Rebecca Hunter.

Via EPR Network
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42% Of Workers Say They Could Be More Productive Out Of The Office

BT Business and Nortel have revealed new independent research* statistics showing that less than one in ten (8%) of the UK’s businesses trust their employees to work out of the office – despite the 42% of workers who are confident that they could do a better job remotely.

The data shows managers are reluctant to move their people away from their outdated, desk-based working models. This is regardless of their employees, who say they could be more productive on the road, working with a customer or from home if they were given the technology to manage and support them.

John Wright, National Chairman, Federation of Small Businesses, said “This boils down to a matter of trust. In the current climate, small firms need to be operating at full stretch. Last week’s bad weather demonstrated the need for British businesses to enable their employees to be productive, wherever they are.”

Despite dramatic changes in the UK workforce since the 1970s, the research points to outdated working practices – such as ‘presenteeism’ where it is thought that if employees are not at their desks, they are not working . The new research suggests that businesses can put such practices to bed by unifying their communications.

Unified communications integrates voice, data, fixed and wireless business channels, allowing teams to work together, answer calls and customer queries whether in or out of the office. Managers can check productivity – down to even the number of calls and emails that are made and answered. Costs and duplicate work are reduced because all customer, supplier and partner contact is reduced to a single communications system.

John Dovey, IT services director at BT Business said: “BT’s 70,000 flexible workers have saved us £500m in building costs and 100,000 tonnes of CO2. We can effectively manage our employees and have seen a 30% rise in productivity. By unifying communications systems our business customers can be more responsive to new opportunities and customer enquiries wherever they are. Faster reaction and fulfilment times are a positive way to increase customer satisfaction, increase loyalty and encourage growth. These technologies can also help to attract and retain staff through flexible working.”

Barry Bonnett, president, Enterprise Solutions, EMEA, Nortel, said “As lifestyles change, so must management’s attitudes towards employees. Unified communications can help managers, but ultimately change depends on trust.”

BT Business understands the challenges that businesses face in the current climate, and supports cost control, improved productivity and winning business through product collections including business broadband & internet, domains & web hosting, data & voice networks, IT solutions and mobile services.

* All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 3473 workers in organisations with less than 500 employees and employed for at least 3 months. Fieldwork was undertaken between 2nd – 8th December 2008. The survey was carried out online. The figures have not been weighted.

About BT
BT is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services operating in 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to customers for use at home, at work and on the move; broadband and internet products and services and converged fixed/mobile products and services. BT consists principally of four lines of business: BT Global Services, Openreach, BT Retail and BT Wholesale.

British Telecommunications plc (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT Group and encompasses virtually all businesses and assets of the BT Group. BT Group plc is listed on stock exchanges in London and New York.

Via EPR Network
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Welcome to EPR Human Resources News

EPR Human Resources News is a new blog, part of EPR Network, that is going to be focused on and will be covering the human resources news and stories from press releases published on EPR Network.

EPR Network (EPR stands for express press release) is one of the nation’s largest press release distribution networks on Web. The EPR’s nationwide network includes 12 State based PR sites, one major PR forum and a number of industry specific PR blogs and what started as a hobby on Internet years ago turned out to be a rapidly growing business today. EPR Network is also known as one of the most trusted (human optimized, published, edited and monitored, spam/scam/low quality PR content free) PR sites on the web with more than 10,000 company and individual press releases distributed per month. EPR Network is putting your press releases on top of all major search engines’ results and is reaching thousands of individuals, companies, PR specialists, media professionals, bloggers and journalists every day.

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