Empowering staff to manage their wellbeing with Microsoft

AstraZeneca plc is a global, science-led biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialisation of prescription medicines. The British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company is headquartered at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, England and employs over 90,000 people worldwide. “At AstraZeneca our mission is to accelerate the delivery of life-changing medicines,” says Juliette White, VP Global SHE and Operations Sustainability at AstraZeneca. “So it’s no surprise that our priority is to ensure that our people feel healthy, safe and motivated”.

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“We are now working with Microsoft to look at how we develop that version two of HealthyMind to make it even more accessible.”

Cara Barratt, Workplace Transformation Lead, AstraZeneca

Creating a fantastic, healthy workforce experience

The company offers a broad spectrum of valuable resources and support for its workforce, including through the establishment of a Global Safe Space Mental Health Awareness Employee Resource Group. One of the ideas generated by the group was a HealthyMind app, for quick and easy access to mental health support.

“We had an opportunity in the Safe Space Employee Resource Group to ask employees what would be the most convenient way for them to access quick and easy mental health support – and that’s how the idea for HealthyMind was born,” explains Gill Hayes-Bell, Co-Chair of the Safe Space global mental health Employee Resource Group at AstraZeneca.

Easy-to-use, low-code ensures rapid rollout

Cara Barratt, Workplace Transformation Lead at AstraZeneca explains, “We wanted to achieve two things. Firstly, ensuring that mental health support was accessible and, secondly, that the solution contains information across all the countries where we have colleagues in AstraZeneca. Building a dedicated app with Microsoft Power Apps was the perfect choice.”

As part of embracing the Microsoft Power Platform, AstraZeneca has established a Centre for Enablement which will support and empower citizen developers to build apps according to best practice and good governance principles. To create HealthyMind the AstraZeneca pro-dev team worked closely with Microsoft to deliver a minimum viable product in just four months.

“Key to the choice [of Power Apps] was its ease of use. It is low-code, so it is quick to develop and deploy. This all meant that we were able to design and build HealthyMind very quickly,” says Matt O'Halloran, Head of Workplace and Enterprise Services at AstraZeneca. “Its natural integration with the broader suite that we use enabled us to deliver the application within the context of Teams, which was another game-changing factor.”

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Enthusiastic colleague engagement with the App

The HealthyMind app has been warmly welcomed by colleagues.

“Because the app is part of an integrated system, even if you’re halfway through something and you think I need to figure out how to manage my stress levels, you can just click on the app and navigate your way through the internal and external resources,” reports Will Banks, an AstraZeneca Maintenance Engineering Apprentice and Mental Health Rep for UK Apprentices.

A springboard for further development

The AstraZeneca team has big plans for how it wants to further develop the HealthyMind app. It also plans to use the success of the app to drive greater awareness of and engagement with the Centre for Enablement to inspire further citizen-led development.

“We are now working with Microsoft to look at how we develop that version two of HealthyMind to make it even more accessible,” enthuses Cara Barratt. “And we’re really looking at how we can empower our colleagues across AstraZeneca so those that have great ideas can develop their own use cases.”

Juliette White agrees, “It’s great to know that with Microsoft we’re empowering our people and our organisation to achieve more.”