This month at Pelican, it was ‘Lights, Camera, Action’ as we invited a film crew to ‘Pelican Towers’ to spend the day creating a short film that summarises the journey a customer takes through our business. At Pelican, we’re focused on ensuring that every interaction we have with our customers is handled professionally, efficiently and with a warm voice. From meter reading to customer service, I am pleased to share with you our finished film showing how we support the end to end journey for 1.2 million customers.
September 2019
If you enjoyed the video and would like to understand a little more about the role Pelican plays for our clients, Bristol Water and Wessex Water, or would like to chat about our current career opportunities, just have a look further around our website.
Over the last few months we have been working hard to raise awareness of the menopause, ensuring that we have the correct policies in place, and that our leaders across the business have the relevant knowledge on how best to support anyone who may be going through it. As a business we recoginsed the importance of ensuring that every team member has the support and guidance available, and we set to work to ensure that no one would ever face the menopause alone.
In August 2019, all of our managers and team leaders attended a briefing session on the menopause ran by an external expert, Lauren Chiren from ‘Women of a Certain Stage’. This was followed up with a workshop where the team suggested lots of ideas for what we could do to support our people. Following this session, we made several commitments:
A menopause policy: We created a menopause policy for all team members.
Reasonable adjustments: We created guidelines for our managers on reasonable adjustments so that they could consider for team members who are experiencing menopause symptoms.
A list of symptoms: A list of symptoms was produced for our managers to help them understand a little more about what people experience.
Reviewing the physical environment: All managers have been provided with some guidelines on changing the physical environment to ensure our team members are more comfortable.
Menopause Mentors: We have organised a list of menopause mentors available so that our team feel they have someone they can go to if they would like to have a conversation outside of their immediate team.
We have also been working on a way to replicate this framework with mental and physical illnesses and disabilities so this month I was pleased to launch our brand-new initiative, ‘Healthy Conversation’.
Over the next 12 months, we will be focusing on a different illness, disability or learning difference each quarter and creating an action plan on how we can raise awareness of each whilst providing support and working adjustments to anyone who may need it.
From October to December, the focus of our ‘Healthy Conversation’ will be all about body image, where we will hear from several members of the team who are struggling or have previously struggled with eating disorders and Body Dysmorphic Disorder. I am really proud of the team who have been working really hard on our new initiative along with the many team members who have bravely shared their experiences with the rest of our business.
In health and wellbeing news, this month we had a visit from TravelWest who joined us in our team member lounge to talk all about sustainable and active travel. The team even brought along their special smoothie bike and made us work for our mid-morning snack!
It was fantastic to see yet another activity for our team focused on raising awareness of not only the physical benefits of exercise, but also the effect it can have on mental wellbeing.
Finally, this week, I would like to say a big thank you to all our teams that made generous donations to our local food banks this month. The donations will be used to provide three days’ of nutritionally balanced emergency food and support to local people who are referred in crisis.