Enhancing Wellbeing, Resilience and Personal Development at Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly has been operating in Ireland since 1978 and today the company employs almost 2,000 people. The manufacturing site in Cork is a high tech manufacturing campus that makes active ingredients for Lilly medicines for use in therapeutic areas such as oncology, immunology, diabetes and pain.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a high percentage of Eli Lilly employees were asked to work from home. In addition to the negative psychological  impact of the Covid-19 crises, working from home was also unchartered territory for the majority of the employees impacted. At the same time, there was also a need to keep manufacturing medicine at an agile pace. This new hybrid way of working was a big shift for the organisation in Kinsale, Co. Cork.

Employees now found themselves isolated in the workplace, working from home, lacking childcare, and yet they had work that had to be done. People’s mental health was affected, and they needed support.

We collaborated with the key stakeholders to understand the challenges employees were facing as they worked to support the business through a pandemic. We designed a programme to support employees feel connected at a deeper level with each other, develop greater levels of resilience & wellbeing within themselves, have a roadmap to navigate the crises & beyond, learn some high performance tools to enable more productive working at home and also in the office and step into a better version of themselves surrounded by their peers.

To ensure we also supported to 24/7 shift staff, we also created a personal development video series to deploy across the entire site, supporting leadership, resilience, rest and recovery, well-being and connection.  

We helped employees to improve their ability to transition through the changing environment, and transform to be their very best every day.

234  employees completed the programme across 116 sessions over a 2-year period. We had a rating of 94% satisfaction from participants. This data shows the positive impact the engagement had on employees.

Participants spoke about the personal impact they made through improving mental toughness, personal leadership and gaining well-being tools to bring with them inside and outside the workplace.

Participants also gained connections with people across the site leading to a greater sense of belonging and a greater sense of the relationship-focused culture that Eli Lilly prides itself on. This led to greater business outputs within Eli Lilly due to the newly formed and strengthened connections of employees at various levels throughout the site.

When teams completed the programme as a unit, they reported coming out of the programme more connected as a team and more trustworthy of each other. Along with that, team leaders now felt they had direct lines of communication they didn’t have before, which directly impacted the site's business performance. The programme had a significant positive impact in supporting people in life to navigate the current VUCA world context.