Facilities management company the Westgrove Group has engaged with retailTRUST to support the welfare of the company’s colleagues.

Through the partnership, Westgrove can now offer free and confidential support to all its 1,000 plus colleagues 24/7 through an on-line portal and helpline, My RTWellbeing.

retailTRUST is a charity which supports the wellbeing of people employed in the service industry including retail, aviation, manufacturing, corporate and many other sectors.

As well as self-help tools online, downloadable resources, counselling and CBT, the Trust also offers critical incident support.

The Westgrove Group is investing heavily in the wellbeing of its colleagues. The Warrington headquartered company recently declared its first Mental Health Awareness Week a big success.

Over the course of a week the company sent out daily advice and information to its colleagues to help build awareness of mental health. Colleagues were also signposted to advice on podcasts and videos and given tools to test their stress and levels of positive mental health.

As part of the Westgrove Aspire Training & Development programme, colleagues were encouraged to take a ‘Mental Health Awareness’ online eLearning course giving them an understanding of the importance of their own and other people’s mental health.

Over 70 Westgrove colleagues are now qualified as MHFA England mental health first aiders with an additional 50 planned by the end of 2020.

Westgrove HR Manager Hannah Denning said: “Supporting the wellbeing of our colleagues is vitally important to us as a company, which is why we are working hard to increase awareness of mental health issues both generally and within the workplace.

“Engaging with retailTRUST allows us to extend our colleague welfare offer in line with the mental health awareness training we rolled out earlier in the year.”

As well as retailTRUST, the company is also working with bodies including the Samaritans, MHFA and Revo, the representative body for retail and shopping centres.