Our CSR Manager, Harriet Turner, recently addressed the Coventry and Warwickshire Annual Business Festival about “Making a business case for a healthy workplace”.  Harriet spoke to the audience of regional businesses about CEMEX UK’s Lend-A-Hand Scheme, with the focus on volunteering for wellbeing.

The main message is – keep lending-a-hand – it’s good for our communities and it’s good for your health too!!  Remember every employee is allowed one work day a year to help a local cause.  Harriet is going to launch a re-vamped scheme in the near future to help make the scheme more flexible, but for now keep on volunteering!

Harriet summarised her talk: “How many of us feel too stressed and busy to worry about helping others right now, or say we’ll focus on doing good deeds when we have more ‘spare time’?

Evidence shows that helping others is actually beneficial for your own mental health and wellbeing and can help with stress. As part of our work at CEMEX UK we aim to embed this theory into our day to day work to help our people lead mentally healthy lives.

There are many different ways that we as a large employer could help our people help others. That is why our LEND A HAND scheme was born. This allows employees to use some of their time at work as a force for good.

We are soon to relaunch this programme as a TIME BANK of days for all our employees to dip into for altruistic causes rather than simply using one singular day, hoping we will make more of an impact on society and our employees.

We’ve invested in allowing the resource and the time for our employees to do various Lend-A-Hand days and projects and since 2012 we have completed over 10,000 hours for 200 different charitable causes and communities which has resulted in a huge list of benefits.

Acts of kindness have the potential to make the world a happier place. An act of kindness can improve confidence, control, happiness and optimism.  They can also encourage others to repeat the good deed that they’ve experienced themselves – it contributes to a more positive community.

The physical side of volunteering and also the positive emotions reduce stress and boost our immune system.  It’s also great for team building, allowing all departments to work together where they might not usually get the opportunity.  And our company gets known as a force for good in our local community and the world in which we are operating.”