The Background

Westfield Health delivers evidence-based health and wellbeing solutions to support people, communities, and workplaces to be healthier.

The challenge

Workplace wellness interventions and programmes are widespread across companies around the world, however there was little extant knowledge of what works, and for who, in this space.

Westfield Health wanted to understand how they could assess need and evaluate the impact of wellness interventions in the workplace both on individual employees and the organisations they work for. This would ensure that future workplace interventions were as effective as possible.

The project

The company partnered with our Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre to undertake a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP). Kate Platts was employed as the associate to lead the 2-year project to develop an evaluation model of current workplace interventions.

Over the course of the project, Kate worked with several Westfield Health clients from different sizes and sectors, to better understand the challenges that directly impact employees’ health and wellbeing.

Though the primary focus of the project was evaluation of workplace programmes, the KTP project faced an unexpected shift due to the disruption caused to Westfield Health and its clients by the Covid-19 pandemic. The focus of the KTP shifted to focusing on the needs of employees during periods of mandated home-working, which caused disruption for millions of people in 2020.

The results

The research showed that there was a demand for a more consultative approach to wellbeing in the workplace, with clients gaining most value when Kate worked collaboratively with them to understand and contextualise research findings.

As a result of the KTP, Westfield Health developed a commercial model for a ‘research and consultancy service’, to provide tailored wellbeing consultancy to clients and their employees which has continued beyond the project in support of Westfield’s diversification strategy. The Research and Consultancy services are now an established part of the large corporate proposition, and therefore featured in all new tenders in the UK and the majority of tenders in Europe.

The project also provided an upskilling opportunity for staff, embedding new knowledge into the business of workplace wellbeing drivers and an increased understanding of the internal wellbeing strategy through established working groups like the internal Wellbeing Steering Group, as well as on an ad hoc basis for people-specific projects under our ‘performance through wellbeing’ banner, for example the Westfield House and Way of Working post-Covid, pulse survey.

They say:

“Working on the KTP has helped bring the importance of research and evidence to life, both internally and externally, in a way we were unable to do before we undertook the KTP.”

Tony Mucci, Chief Growth Officer, Westfield Health