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Case Study: Nestle UK

Nestlé UK's mission is to be the world's foremost food, nutrition, health and wellness company. To achieve this, it needs a workforce that is healthy, knowledgeable about nutrition, productive and engaged, and therefore its over-arching approach is to transform and integrate employee wellbeing into an organisation-wide initiative.

The three strands of activity of the Employee Wellness Programme are:

• Increased physical activity
• Nutrition
• Mental resilience

A governance structure was created, led by Nestlé's Head of Employee Wellness, and supported by three Executive Board members – the HR, Technical and Production, and Corporate Affairs Directors. They are supported by an External Advisory Group, composed of external experts on chronic disease management, nutrition and exercise, plus a National Union Officer, a role established to challenge, support and advise the ongoing programme.

For the first years of the programme, attention has been focused on the increased physical activity and nutrition pillars.

Nestlé UK wanted to make exercise easier for employees and the solution was participation in the Global Corporate Challenge (GCC), a unique walking scheme, which helps employees become more active by encouraging them to walk a target of 10,000 steps per day.

In 2009, 1,800 (36%) of Nestlé UK's employees participated and all walked over 12,800 steps daily – 350% more than previously – winning Nestle the award of 'The World's Most Active Company' for the second consecutive year, beating over 800 other businesses across the world.

Nestlé had 21 teams in the top 1% of global teams in the GCC competition, and its top team was third place in the global ranking, each averaging 28,000 steps a day. Independent external analysis of the health effects from participating in the event has shown significant improvements in both mental and physical wellbeing.

On the nutrition side, Nestlé has reviewed its catering contracts and stipulated minimum nutrition standards with suppliers. It is also revitalising in-house catering to offer employees tasty, nutritionally balanced meals and snacks and is empowering employees to make better nutritional choices through the provision of nutrition information in the form of Guideline Daily Amount labelling (GDAs). Evidence from the in-house restaurants suggests that employees are increasingly opting for the healthier alternatives on offer and actively using the GDA information to make healthier choices.

The company has also provided employees with access to an external health screening service run by the Nuffield Healthcare Group and is funding 50% of the costs. Employees' families also have access to the service at a discounted rate.

Nestlé is the winner of FDF Gold Award for the best employee wellness programme.

It has also been awarded the bronze NHS award at its Newcastle site for wellness, voted the best occupational health team by Occupational Health magazine and is a signatory of the Business in the Community commitment to board-level reporting on employee wellness.

More Information

FDF has published a booklet called Workplace Wellbeing: The Food Industry in Action (pdf, 984kb) which features many workplace wellbeing schemes .

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