About Pension Protection Fund

Pension Protection Fund have completed a series of health and wellbeing workshops for the last year to positively engage with employees and help enhance their health and wellbeing. The topics have been varied to encourage employees to attend. The company have run workshops of mindfulness, sleep deprivation, nutrition, fitness, impact on the immune system, dealing with difficult people, resilience, work/life balance, people skills, how to deal with lack of energy, how to take control and sharpen your focus. The sessions are normally led by external provider: ‘Feelgood’. The company have had nutritionists, clinical psychologists, mindfulness practitioners and sports consultants in to lead and engage with their employees. The sessions tend to be held in a boardroom with the speakers guiding the attendees through slides, enabling discussion and on occasion group work. Sometimes the session can be interactive such as the fitness session. The slides and handouts are then posted to the intranet for download. The handouts that accompany the slides have soundbites and top tips around health and wellbeing, and all have been positively welcomed. Pension Protection Fund also run monthly free fruit drops for employees, they provide enough fruit for an am and pm drop in both market squares and signpost reminders each month that the fruit drop is available.

Pension Protection Fund have a Sports, Social and Charity Committee (SSCC) which is responsible for organising PPF-wide money-raising events. Staff voted for Cancer Research UK as their national charity for 2015, and the SSCC has organised a cake sale, quiz night, football tournament and raffles to raise money. There are also stations for staff to leave donations to Cancer Research UK shops. In the first five months Pension Protection Fund have donated 91 bags. The company’s local charity initiative with Croydon Commitment enables them to take part in a number of 'Community Days' throughout the year. In December 2014, the company prepared and served Christmas dinner at Parchmore Community Centre for local pensioners, and they also packed Christmas hampers at Croydon Neighbourhood Care Association. In December 2014, PPF volunteers decorated apartments at a local residential complex for older people. More recently, PPF volunteers helped turn an outdoor play space into an external classroom at St Giles' School, a school for pupils with physical disabilities and complex medical needs. This involved plenty of painting and preparing surfaces. Pension Protection Fund have installed a food bank donation station in their office to support the Croydon based Save Humanity Organisation’s Community Food Bank.

In 2014, all teams across the PPF took part in creating a highly visual ‘rich art’ journey picture to engage everyone in the company’s desire to be a high-performing Customer Focused Financial Institution (CFFI) to deliver their vision and mission through their values. Launched at an all-staff event in July 2014, the final picture is a tool to prompt ongoing conversations, in teams and between colleagues, driving a shared sense of purpose. The picture is used in different ways to effectively communicate the company’s CFFI messages on an ongoing basis including: ‘Welcome to the PPF’ session for new joiners – teams explain their part in enabling the PPF to achieve objectives by sharing their ‘story’ within the framework of the picture, large 3D ‘cut-outs’ from the picture were created as visual aids to support messages at our the company staff event in June 2015 (eg putting the customer at the heart of they we do and the importance of embracing a commercial mind-set), giant posters have been placed around the company’s building in breakout areas to promote peer to peer discussions and images from the picture illustrate relevant messages/case studies in the company’s recently launched employee magazine ‘Connect’.