I have not heard of chill out Zones except in my last job providing OH to a learning disability trust where they were provided more for the service users than for the staff.
However we have recently started providing small amounts of money to groups of staff to start up various health promotion/alternative therapy sessions - usually in conjunction with sports and social clubs. We now have lunchtime running clubs, indian head massage and all sorts going on and it is proving very popular (not surprisingly) but hopefully beneficial to the business.
To give you an idea of scale we have £5k available for 11,000 employees. This usually divides up to £500 per region. We set criteria for use ie - non encroachment into working time, minimum number of people interested etc. Difficult to measure impact but is small cost in large organisation and appears to have good cost benefit. I will let you know if we ever try and measure it more scientifically.
Lindsey Hall
National OH Manager
Environment Agency
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