Balfour Beatty Plant & Fleet Services’ multi-pronged wellness programme for managers in May proved a success, prompting plans to roll it out to all 450 staff.

Ei World delivered the programme, Resilience Edge, which includes personal coaching sessions and focuses on peak performance, emotional intelligence, wellness and use of the HeartMath resilience tool.

Geetu Bharwaney, founder of Ei World, said: “What is interesting about the programme is the unique focus placed on wellness for executives. It’s combined with real-time feedback on key health indicators and an emotional intelligence assessment. They also learn tools for resilience in the HeartMath system. In this way, individuals were supported at both individual and team level.”

She said Balfour Beatty Plant & Fleet Services is a highly diverse business with multiple operating divisions and a diverse range of employees, operating “in a very hard-edged context where typically ‘pink and fluffy’ just does not work”.

Each executive had a 20-minute health screening with a wellness coach to assess key health indicators. The executives were also given a Personal Stress biofeedback device, an EmWave, to monitor their “physiological coherence” – an important measure of executive stress levels and wellness, said Bharwaney.

Steve Farmer, managing director of Balfour Beatty Plant & Fleet Services, said: “For the first time we have in one simple document all the aggregated health numbers of our most senior managers. This is very powerful data and gives us a starting point for taking individual action. A healthy team is a healthy company. The personal ‘numbers’ help us to be able to gauge the readiness of our management team for the challenges we face in our business and to help wellbeing towards our sustainability vision for 2020. The good news is that everyone can work on their wellness and this programme provides a useful start with the use of HeartMath tools which have been proven to reduce stress and increase vitality and performance.”

The programme was delivered over a day and a half by Bharwaney with executive wellness business Beyond the Barriers, Olympic canoeist Anna Hemmings MBE and cardiovascular expert Dr Dorian Dugmore.

Ei World equips coaches with tools for sustainable performance and training. It was recently awarded a contract to deliver the HeartMath One-to-One provider programme.

Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4