COVID-19 care packs ease the return to office working

When the UK went into the first national lockdown in April, the James Fisher group marketing team began planning the contents of a ‘care pack’, which could be sent to every employee to ease their transition back to office work.  

This resulted in the production of 1,800 care packs, most of which have now been distributed in the UK. International employees will be receiving their care packs in early 2021. 

‘We are always very keen to show employees how much they are valued, and felt it was important to do everything we could to make employees comfortable as and when they returned to their usual workplace,’

says Jasper Stickney, coordinator of the project.  

It was a logistical challenge to bring everything together in-house during lockdown, but the marketing team was assisted by Martek Marine, which sourced the pouches and took charge of the packing and distribution. 

Each pack contains useful items to help colleagues work safely together, including a reusable PPE face mask, a bottle of hand sanitiser, disinfectant wipes, hand moisturiser and a hygienic hand keyring (for opening doors and pressing buttons) in a robust and reusable black zip up pouch. They also contained a message from James Fisher CEO, Eoghan O’Lionaird, a flyer with information about hygiene and safety, healthy eating recipe cards, a wellbeing quiz and a fun exercise challenge.  

One of the most popular elements has been the James Fisher Mariana Trench exercise challenge, which invited teams of up to 10 to record their distance covered and complete the required steps to (theoretically) cross the world’s largest oceanic trench.  

The Mariana trench is 69km wide, or 90,551 steps and 19 teams took part in the challenge with 117 participants from group companies including JFD, Prolec, JFMS, RMSpumptools, JFO, JFN, James Fisher AIS, JFTS, JFS IT, JFS Marketing, JFS HR, and JFS accounts.  

The winners were The Proposals Pavement Pounders from JFO, which completed the required step count on the 1st October.