Written by: Tom Hoosen-Webber, Chief People & Procurement Officer, Bupa Global, India & UK
Tom is Chief People & Procurement Officer for Bupa Global, India & UK. He joined Bupa in 2018, having previously held the role of Transformation and Change Director at TalkTalk. He has held senior HR and transformation roles across sectors, including manufacturing, supply chain and telecoms.
At Bupa, everyone is welcome. With 23,000 colleagues across the UK, our people are at the heart of our business, providing high quality services to our patients, residents and customers every day.
We truly believe that our people are at their best when they can bring their whole selves to work, and a happy, healthy workforce is essential for business performance, productivity and talent retention.
And it’s essential that our workforce reflects the diversity of our customers so that we can understand and evolve to their needs. This helps us deliver our purpose; helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives and making a better world.
So how do we create an open culture that celebrates difference and has inclusion at its heart?
On a practical level it starts with celebrating that everyone is different. Our people are our drivers of inclusion, and it’s through listening that we’ve designed support and benefits to meet their needs.
Our Be You at Bupa network is designed to provide peer-to-peer support for colleagues through community groups who provide a representative voice on things such as race and ethnicity, faith, gender and health concerns.
We also reviewed our Viva healthcare benefits to make them inclusive, accessible and tailored– particularly for the 15,000 people working in our care homes, dental practices and clinics. We devised new medical benefits in response to colleague feedback. The support is all free and available to gift to friends and family – we know our people worry about their families’ health and we didn’t want cost to prevent colleagues using them. Under our new Bupa Viva Benefits platform, colleagues now have easy access to mental health and physiotherapy support, GP appointments at evenings and weekends, as well as vital services such as cancer checks, menopause support and our Bupa health assessments.
Most recently we launched our Bupa Period Plan, supporting our people who are struggling with symptoms, alongside our Bupa Menopause Plan launched in 2021. Our Bupa Wellbeing Index showed that almost half (47%) of women who have periods experience severe period pain most months, but just a fifth have felt comfortable to take a sick day.
We’ve also increased our support for colleagues who are neurodiverse, LGBTQ+, have parental responsibilities, or going through bereavement or pregnancy loss.
It’s vital that we understand the diverse perspectives of both our people and our customers. As the Official Healthcare Partner for ParalympicsGB, this has increased our understanding of the difficulties faced by disabled people in our society and the workplace, and what more can be done to ensure an inclusive and accessible workplace environment.
Being agile and open in our culture allows us to innovate and make tangible change, quickly. Our research showed that two in five people with less visible disabilities have avoided disclosing them at work for fear of reprisals, leading to presenteeism and poor physical and mental health. We’ve audited our physical spaces, language and culture to ensure it is accessible, increased training for our people managers on disability inclusion and workplace adjustments, and we’re committed to sharing our learnings with our corporate partners too in order to make real change throughout the landscape.
Innovation is key. We are always looking for ways to make roles easier for our people, making processes more efficient so more of their time can be spent doing what they love; providing healthcare. That’s why we have introduced digital technology into our 120+ care homes so that care notes can be updated in real time, freeing up our people to spend time with our much loved residents.
We need to retain talented people as well as attracting people with transferrable skills who are looking for a new challenge. We support people with their career ambitions and provide learning, so that they can grow their careers with Bupa.
Last year we placed 1,700 apprentices across our businesses in the UK in 37 different areas including dental nursing, care services, leadership, IT and customer services. We love to see people learn and grow their careers with us and whether they want to qualify as a registered nurse, run their own care home, lead a team or even relocate across our Bupa world, we support them to achieve their goals.
When it comes to supporting our people to be at their best; there is always more to be done. It’s vital that we continue to innovate and listen in order to make change. We know that to become the world’s most customer-centric healthcare company, our people must stay at the heart.
