Wellbeing Drive

Mary Beighton, People and Culture Director, Zuto says wellbeing strategies need to be more than words and details how their approach is driven by their people.

I’m often asked what I think wellbeing means. It’s become a catch-all term that risks being devalued and seen as a tick-box exercise – like free pizza on a Friday or fruit in the office – unless it’s elevated to being recognised as a core component of a company’s strategy.

Over the past couple of years, businesses have started to acknowledge the consequences of greenwashing. Sustainability credentials are being watched more closely by customers, investors, and the media. We’re now seeing the same scrutiny applied to wellbeing initiatives, and I suspect we’ll read about more token gestures being called out this year, with terms such as well-washing beginning to emerge.

That’s because, like sustainability, wellbeing is not about individual actions. It is a vision that’s led from the top of an organisation. It also has to demonstrate a clear understanding of, and empathy with, the people within that organisation.

At Zuto, our overarching goal is to change the car finance industry for the better. That means wellbeing has to extend across our ecosystem – from our customers and partners to every single employee, our Zutonites. 

A physical, mental and financial wellbeing strategy

Our wellbeing strategy has been built around three core pillars – physical, mental and financial. As a people team, we have put processes and controls in place to ensure that everything we do supports these pillars, meaning we can measure their impact more effectively.

We are currently working towards ISO 45003 accreditation, for example, which will provide even more rigour around these processes. ISO 45003 is the first global standard on managing psychological health and safety at work. We hope to be one of the first fintechs to go through the accreditation, which again ties back to our mission to improve the industry and also underpins our B Corp principles of balancing people, purpose and planet.

As part of the process we are carrying out extensive research among our teams, looking at where we are now and where the gaps lie. Achieving external accreditation is obviously a good way to demonstrate our wellbeing credentials, but for us this whole project is more about helping us to focus and prioritise, and to feel confident that we’re doing the right thing.

The benchmarking exercise has given us invaluable insight into what our people value the most, and the results weren’t always what we might have predicted. Physical wellbeing, for example, scored lowest of the six themes of ISO wellbeing standards. So, while we know we can’t completely transform the physical wellbeing of every single Zutonite overnight, we have very quickly been able to implement more signposting around nutritional advice or health initiatives.

Our Wellbeing Impact Group has also been able to make recommendations based on the findings. The group comprises representatives from across the organisation. They meet formally on a quarterly basis to feed back to us on what they think we should prioritise. They also have a very active internal group that meets on a more regular basis to make suggestions, like Frugal February – from which we have built a programme focused exclusively on financial wellbeing.

Measuring our impact

Knowing whether our strategy is working is crucial. We have a number of methods and KPIs in place to do this. As well as eliciting feedback after each wellbeing initiative or session, we also look at engagement rates and patterns of behaviour. For example, do we have an increasing number of Zutonites signing up to events or engaging with content; are we reaching people across all levels of the organisation; are people completing sessions; are we seeing an uplift in performance and staff retention levels?

We can also see whether some initiatives are seeing higher engagement levels than others? With the current cost of living crisis and energy price hikes, we have seen an increased use of our cash back plans, for instance, as well as our Employee Assistance Programme where employees can access counselling services and advice. Our first offsite Wellbeing Workshop, which we ran at the end of 2023, was open to the entire business and attended by almost 100 Zutonites.

Encouragingly we have also seen a rise in the number of secondary caregivers taking advantage of our shared parental leave policy. This has encouraged us to look at where we can introduce even more flexible working patterns, so we can continue to diversify our workforce and make sure our roles appeal to all.

What next for wellbeing?

Wellbeing is intrinsically linked with culture. How people feel about the organisation they work for invariably affects their lives both in and out of work. During our benchmarking research it was just as important to discover how our people feel about being Zutonites and the culture we have built.

One member of the team fed back that Zuto encourages employees to be themselves and we received a number of comments about how much we care, treat people like individuals and are always looking to do the right thing.

This is important for us, and beyond our ISO accreditation we are constantly looking for new ways to make life better for our employees and for them to feel happy, safe and rewarded in their work. I want us to continue to challenge the status quo and try to do things differently.

While it can be difficult for companies to retain an agile, start-up mentality as they grow, Zuto remains a people-first business – albeit that we now have a robust set of systems and processes to underpin that. As one of our team fed back: “I think Zuto is a company that is willing to try new approaches to things without much fear. It’s not about doing things just because that’s how they’re traditionally done.”

From our CEO, who is the lead sponsor on the ISO accreditation programme, to our mental health first aiders and menopause ambassadors, everything we do feeds into our overall objective to do things better, and the Zuto way.