Partnership is one of the cornerstones of success for John Lewis. After all, the people who work in its stores aren’t just employees, they are partners sharing in the rewards of the business.

As Occupational Health Adviser in the Edinburgh store, Anne Tait knows better than most how this translates for those who work there. The partnership aims to support health and well-being, both in the workplace and outside it.

Anne explains that the concept of partnership is absolutely fundamental to the morale and well-being of all the people who work at the store. “It’s very important,” she says. “Our partners are vital to the business, and so we are always trying to look after them in different ways.”

The store aims to take a holistic approach to health and well-being, from ensuring that partners have access to a wide range of health and safety information to promoting physical activity at work as a way of fitting exercise into their busy lives. Anne recently suggested that partners reduce their use of the lifts, for example. “I have got them all walking up the stairs,” she laughs.

The partnership also subsidises a range of sporting activities, from gym memberships to golf, and the store often pays for partners to take part in fund-raising events like the Race for Life, Edinburgh Marathon, or the Great Scottish Walk.

The Edinburgh store also actively promotes well-being, and there are treatment rooms in store where partners can have sessions with podiatrists, physiotherapists and aromatherapists.

Occupational health sessions and smoking cessation classes are also on offer, and Anne has successfully introduced voluntary health screening checks that partners can sign up for. Both general fitness checks and blood pressure screening have proven very popular, she says.

“I got 65 people in for the fitness checks, and I thought that was really good,” she says. “They are re-tested in six weeks or three months and so they have got that option to come back.”

The store runs a blood pressure campaign every September, and screening through simple blood pressure checks has helped to pick up on undiagnosed conditions, she adds.

“Hypertension is called the silent disease, and there have been one or two people we didn’t know about, so the checks are very good,” she says. “We do that every year.”

Partners are also encouraged to eat healthily at the subsidised dining room, she adds. “We are very fortunate in that the partners’ dining room, apart from having a beautiful view, has a vast range of food we can choose from,” she says.

The work done towards the Gold Award also reflects the Edinburgh store’s strong commitment to environmental issues. Besides a concerted effort to raise environmental awareness, the store has also introduced a number of practical measures to reduce its carbon footprint. For example, partners are all encouraged to reduce waste paper and turn off lights when not needed.

“As a partnership, we are trying to think a lot more about how we become environmentally friendly,” explains Anne. “We are thinking about our paper waste and we’ve had workshops to do with the environment. Everybody has now got a bin for separating the cardboard and the paper. The maintenance guys have got ‘champions’ and they have been having regular meetings and working together to make sure it’s all happening. We had an environmental week in March and had people in talking about recycling.”

Despite having achieved the Gold Award, Anne says the store won’t be resting on its laurels, and she says she has noticed the additional benefits that the HWL Award Programme has offered compared to the previous Scotland’s Health at Work (SHAW) scheme.

“We achieved the Gold Award under SHAW two or three years ago, and obviously that was a big boon. Then our adviser Kathryn Sinclair told us about the new Healthy Working Lives Award Programme, and how it was being expanded by developing the dimensions of mental health, health and the environment, employability and occupational health and safety. We talked about what it was about and how it would be good for the branch and good for partners. She was very helpful and she has been a great support to us all.”

And while most initiatives could be done without signing up for the Award Programme, Anne says the store might not have achieved so much so quickly.

“That’s what’s good about Healthy Working Lives,” she says. “It gets you focused and it gives you the framework to work from. It’s been really beneficial to the branch – and to the partners.”

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