Jaguar Land Rover receives Award for supporting mental health

Jaguar Land Rover has won an award for its commitment to its employees’ mental health.

The British carmaker won a bronze award at mental health charity Mind’s Workplace Wellbeing Index Awards, held last night at London’s Soho Hotel.

The inaugural event was hosted by TV presenter, author and Mind ambassador, Anna Williamson, with the aim of recognising and celebrating employers’ commitment to prioritising mental health at work.

Jaguar Land Rover was the only vehicle manufacturer among 29 organisations, including Deloitte, HMRC, the Environment Agency and PepsiCo, to complete Mind’s Workplace Wellbeing Index assessment 2016/17, in which 15,022 employees were queried on their mental health. Roughly 520 employees in JLR’s manufacturing engineering section were involved.

Mind praised JLR for achieving change, with its citation stating: “Your organisation has started the journey to better mental health at work by developing and implementing initiatives which promote positive mental health for staff”.

Senior manager Matt Taylor, who received the trophy, told Press Association: “We’re really pleased to win the award. It’s recognition of the type of work we’ve started around wellbeing and gives a good levelling point to gauge our improvement in future years. It’s really important for us that it isn’t a one-off and that it’s part of our overall onward development of our wellbeing strategy for our teams.”

He said JLR was keen to support its workers, adding: “The whole work-based experience for our employees is really important to us. Taking care of people just makes business sense. It’s the right thing to do. Within Jaguar Land Rover we have very good, strong occupational health teams, supplemented with an employee assistance programme.”

Of all those surveyed in the index, 2,200 employees admitted suffering poor mental health at work. Just over half of these (53 per cent) said they felt supported, and 72 per cent said they’d been made aware of the support tools such as employee assistance programmes, counselling, staff support network or informal buddying systems.

More than half (56 per cent), meanwhile, were offered reasonable adjustments or support measures, such as changes to working hours or some of their duties.

Twelve per cent of respondents (1,765 employees) said their mental health was poor, with 26 per cent of these attributing this to problems at work.