?It just makes life good?

Designed to engage the workforce in creative activity on every comfort level, from live music in the workplace to more challenging creative and cultural opportunities, Arts@Work is a collaboration between Scottish Widows and Arts and Business Scotland. The project aims to enhance the working lives of a large workforce employed in everything from client services to marketing, risk and compliance, and IT.

At a basic level the company recognises that happier staff equals happier customers, but there are other gains to be made in a business area – life, pensions and investment – which can be, by its very nature, risk averse and conservative. Sir Ken Robinson (author of ‘All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education’) has said, “The world is moving in revolutionary circumstances and we can’t move forward unless we develop our most basic capacities – to anticipate and imagine and prepare for things.” In a competitive financial services world, creative thinking and new ideas are desirable, and the long-term objective is to enhance the workforce capability in these areas. In the shorter term, the hope is to foster an atmosphere of creativity and enjoyment in the workplace, and to widen that experience out to the wider arts scene and to families.

The project began with a large-scale survey of the cultural lives, interests and aspirations of the 4,000 staff, and, heartened by the response from almost 1,000 staff, the first year set off on an experimental journey from which we have learned a great deal. Three artist residencies formed the heart of the programme, each setting out to engage the staff directly in everything from classes to specific projects. For example, our poet in residence Elspeth Murray offered a Curious Question of the Week project where staff responded to questions such as ‘What do you wish you understood?’ The answers were crafted into a weekly poem, which was published on the intranet.

Activities outside the residencies included visits to cultural events and in-house workshops, exhibitions, and family activities. We celebrated the mid-year point with the Arty Party, an arts-focused day in which 605 staff and their families enjoyed everything from arts activities to clowns, balloons and bouncy castles.

Last year there were 70 individual events covering a multitude of artforms, engaging 2,600 people, and we go into the second year with a better sense of focus and an encouraging interim evaluation which concluded that “Employees who engaged with the programme experienced short and long term benefits (life and personal development) which also had a positive impact on business performance.”

But perhaps the best encouragement for the project comes from the workforce itself, who send a constant flow of e-mails offering comments, making suggestions, or just wanting to talk about arts.

“It is all about information, it is all about knowledge, all about acquiring something that you did not know and acquiring experience you have not had. It just makes life good.” – Richard, IT