Honey Bun launches staff wellness support programme
Baking company Honey Bun is focusing on the welfare of its staff members as they continue to grapple with the fall-out of COVID-19,
Last week the 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 on-site at its Retirement Road, St Andrew location, in collaboration with Choose Life International, a faith-based 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; separation and divorce; grief and loss; depression; suicidal tendencies; lifestyle and other challenges.
“Honey Bun’s decision to invest in its staff member’s 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,” said Thomas, whose organisation has been offering corporate wellness programmes for more than a decade.
He 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,” said Thomas.
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.
In 2017, Honey Bun updated its mission statement to “lead, achieve and serve” and the company says this programme aligns with its mandate to serve its 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,” said BradshawDavis as she emphasised that the service is characterised by privacy, confidentiality and professionalism.
According to Bradshaw-davis, these sessions, which started 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.