Honey Bun supports staff wellness
WHILE MANY businesses locally and internationally continue to grapple with the economic fallout of COVID-19, Honey Bun Limited is looking within, focusing on its staff members’ welfare.
Last week, the baking company launched its Staff Wellness and Support Programme, offering professional confidential counselling and empowerment services for its permanent and short-term employees.
The sessions are offered onsite at its Retirement Road, Kingston, location, in collaboration with Choose Life International, a faithbased organisation, founded by Dr Donovan Thomas and his wife Faith. The mandate of Choose Life International is to help people live physically, emotionally and spiritually abundant lives.
Under this programme, and through Choose Life’s counselling service, support is offered to Honey Bun’s staff and their family members, to empower them to address, in a healthy way, issues such as: conflict management; stress management; anger management; work ethics and optimum productivity; parental challenges; family matters; including addiction, separation and divorce; grief and loss; depression; suicidal tendencies; lifestyle and other challenges.
PROACTIVE
Dr Thomas notes, “Honey Bun’s decision to invest in its staff members’ emotional well-being by engaging the service of Choose Life International is very commendable, very proactive, relevant, speaks of care and compassion and sensitivity to the needs of the employees. It also speaks of a deep commitment to pour into the lives of the employees.” In 2017, Honey Bun updated its Mission Statement to: LEAD, ACHIEVE AND SERVE. This programme aligns with its mandate to serve its valued employees.
Human Resource and Development Manager at Honey Bun, Khalice Bradshaw-Davis explained that the programme is an expansion of one that already existed, but goes much deeper. “When our employees do well, our company does well,” she said, emphasising that the service is characterised by privacy, confidentiality and professionalism.
These sessions, which commenced on November 3, will run once a week for a year, giving employees one-on-one sessions with a qualified counsellor. Bradshaw-Davis noted that the second phase of the Staff Wellness and Support Programme, will be the establishment of a phone line available to members of staff and family members to access the service 24/7. The final phases will include group counselling dependent on the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr Thomas, whose organisation has been offering corporate wellness programmes for over a decade, noted that the productive outlook of a company is very often connected to the emotional well-being of staff members. “The healthier the staff members are - the more productive they are, have better interpersonal relationships, the more they contribute to the organisational goals, the more willing they are to go the extra mile and the greater their commitment to the business,”he said.
He noted that especially during a pandemic, people in the workplace face a variety of problems such as social isolation and loneliness; anxiety and stress; depression, suicidal thoughts, family conflicts and sometimes financial reversals.
The Honey Bun initiative has been well received with overwhelmingly positive feedback from staff members.