Our wellbeing culture

In 2024, we launched our refreshed wellbeing plan, which reinforces our longstanding commitment to supporting our colleagues to be at their best. 

We're building upon the positive progress made in recent years with a renewed focus on mental wellbeing and increasing the utilisation of the support available to our colleagues. We have taken an employee-focused approach, supported with data-driven insights to inform our actions.

Wellbeing initiatives

To maximise the reach and effectiveness of our wellbeing programmes, we combine centralised support with our wellbeing champions and employee inclusion networks and listening forums, to help drive local action plans across our contracts. This approach enables us to better understand what’s important for  our people and deliver impactful local campaigns and signpost to support on key topics.

We are focused on empowering individuals, their line managers and our business leaders to proactively manage wellbeing at a local level by providing relevant insights, updating line manager training, improving communication and using employee survey data to deliver targeted interventions.

We have updated our medical and wellbeing support for employees and made it more inclusive, including access to a Digital GP service for all Costain colleagues and their families, making it easier to access the support they need, when they need it. During the last quarter of 2024, we have seen a steady increase in its usage and initial feedback has been positive, with many employees saying that they would recommend them to colleagues. 

Other updates that support both health and wellbeing include women having access to a paid menopause plan. We have been able to extend this support to our male colleagues, who are supporting the women in their lives, at a reduced rate. We provide access to on-site wellbeing medicals, aimed at identifying health risks and providing advice and support about proactive lifestyle changes that will lead to better future outcomes.

As we keep in mind the holistic approach to wellbeing, we are also focusing on support for employees with financial wellbeing, improving outcomes for rehabilitation through a revised sickness absence policy and further improving work-life balance, which is always an important topic raised in our engagement survey, 
by enhancing our parental leave and policies around neonatal care, shared parental leave, fostering and surrogacy to support people through impactful life events.

Wellness room at Costain London office

Wellbeing partnerships

Costain works in partnership with Samaritans and Business in the Community (BITC), sharing best practice, access to research and developing campaigns. Costain’s chief people and sustainability officer is a member of the BITC wellbeing campaign leadership team, working with C-suite peers from blue chip organisations to further improve wellbeing outcomes across industry. 

In 2024 we were asked to talk at BITC peer learning forum about our wellbeing and EDI approach, while BITC supported Costain to deliver a leadership impact day (employee standdown) on the theme of wellbeing. The day provided a unique opportunity for all our employees to get together and discuss the themes of the previous employee engagement survey and wellbeing challenges that they face, raise awareness of the support and benefits available to colleagues, all with the aim to develop and execute local-level action plans to drive positive wellbeing outcomes. Samaritans supported us with a ‘break the silence toolkit’ which is focused on suicide prevention and was shared across the organisation.

Voluntary reporting on disability, mental health and wellbeing

As part of our achievement in becoming a Disability Confident Leader we are committed to providing voluntary reporting on disability, mental health and wellbeing as per the UK Government framework. 

We undertake an engagement survey annually, which provides us with disability data for our employee population. Our 2024 engagement survey saw 6.6% of respondents shared that they were disabled, 74.1% respond as non-disabled and 19.3% chose not to disclose.

Our 2024 survey demonstrates that overall, disabled employees have no different experience of pay and reward. There are differing experiences of personal growth and wellbeing among the responses, so we recognise we have more work to do to address barriers to progression and positive wellbeing for disabled people in the workplace. 

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