Una Kent is VP, ESG and DEI, International at Walgreens Boots Alliance. Here, she explains why the organisation decided to become menopause friendly and shares her top tips on how they achieved this.
As a health and beauty retailer, Boots and No7 Beauty company are constantly and consistently championing and raising awareness of women’s wellbeing. They are passionate about supporting all colleagues in the workplace and their approach to menopause support has been holistic and meticulous.
The demographics of the organisation are predominantly female and they have a great history of long service. Most team members will either experience menopause or be working alongside a team member who does during their career. Add to that, their core customer audience is 20-70 years old.
Which meant that introducing menopause awareness and support made perfect sense both internally and externally, with the organisation extending some of their initiatives into customer-facing activities.
Making them the perfect fit as sponsors for the Awards, and the Awards the perfect fit for them. A true meeting of minds.
For Una, there were three key reasons to focus on menopause.
“We wanted to promote gender equity, ensuring we have a better representation of women at all levels in the organisation,” she says. “This means supporting women throughout the entirety of their careers with us.
“We also know that labour markets and demographics are changing and our population is getting older. It’s important to us that we’re an attractive employer for older women, plus we want to make sure we’re retaining all of the great talent we already have.
“And of course, we’re a responsible organisation and we want to do the right thing. Creating a truly inclusive working environment for everyone within our organsation means we can talk openly about the things that matter.”
The organisation also had three key aims in their journey to becoming menopause friendly:
Raising awareness about menopause at work. This meant helping to empower those experiencing menopause to get the support they needed when they needed it.
Talking openly. They wanted to create a culture of openness around topics like menopause, making it a safe environment to open up discussions about these subjects.
Owning their responsibilities as an employer. As a healthcare company, as well as looking after their team members they’re looking after the communities they serve.
Una’s top tips for introducing and embedding support:
- Listen to your people. We organised listening sessions which highlighted a few things – women themselves needed more information about menopause, symptoms and how it might affect them, particularly in the workplace. We aimed to increase awareness overall, even for those who would never experience menopause.
- Create support networks. This helps people to meet and engage with likeminded people and share stories. Our Menopause Support Network of likeminded women and allies has been a big success.
- Have written menopause guidance. We introduced this for our team members, including more information about menopause, signposting where to go to get help, additional resources and learning tools. We also introduced new policies around HRT – any team members who chooses to take HRT can recover the cost of their prescription.
- Make training widely available. We chose eLearning, and made this available and accessible to all team members through online learning hub.
- Consider sustainability. The greatest challenge for anything like this is the sustainability of the change. It’s not just a ‘one and done’. We wanted to be committed in the long term and to be authentic in how we adapted and adopted the change, maintaining e learning, networks and dialogue.
- Be integrated and holistic. Don’t just change one thing over here and hope it will evolve over there. Look at the other areas which could be impacted and extend your initiatives into your wider working practices. Menopause can affect people in so many different ways, physically and mentally, so it can easily be incorporated into other aspects of your support offerings.
- Look to diversified and relevant comms. You want to reach everyone, so use as many channels as you can to make this happen. Tell them, tell them and tell them again! We used posters, QR codes, social media, leader-led cascades… lots of different dynamics to make sure we were getting the word out.
- Think intersectionality. How does this subject integrate with other subjects across your organisation? For example, we looked specifically at black women’s experience in menopause.
“For us it was about breaking down barriers to access, not just giving support and advice, but taking a holistic view of how being on the menopause journey could impact someone and exploring our role in enabling people to get the proper support they needed,” says Una.
“I’m so proud to be part of this and to be a sponsor along with so many likeminded organisations and I applaud everyone involved. To work with Henpicked, who are genuine authentic experts, is always a pleasure. So we’re delighted and honoured to be a sponsor of the 2024 Menopause Friendly Employer Awards.”
