Mental Health in the workplace - An Update.

News Article

After completing the mental health first aid training we spent time looking at how we can add to the positive culture that already exists in the agency, but we wanted to focus on being people as person centred as possible and as we mentioned in our previous blog, the 5 ways to wellbeing: Be active, Give, Connect, Keep Learning and Take Notice. To be truly person centered we wanted the voices and ideas of the agency as a whole, so our first phase was to collect these ideas and needs from the whole team to build our plans and support around.

We put together an initial questionnaire to gauge how the rest of the team felt about how they wanted to utilise the resources in order to approach this in their best interests rather than our own preconceptions. The questionnaire was anonymous and covered issues both in and outside of the workplace whilst giving staff the opportunity to get across their thoughts, but also any suggestions.

We've decided to merge the existing social team with the mental health first aiders to create a community team. This will create a more united approach to how we bring everyone together and create an open environment where people feel comfortable talking, whilst still keeping the fun, social aspects that were already in place.

We know that everyone's needs and troubles are different both in and out of the workplace and people's approaches to these are also unique. So we decided to create the ‘43 Learning Hub’ - Creating a space where people can share any resources they've found useful when dealing with any level of mental health issues with their peers. Tisi also covers workplace development and now financial resources due to the current cost of living crisis everyone is feeling the pinch of. This space can be uncapped in subject matter making it relevant to everyone who needs to use it or wants to add to it. This has been received very well and also acts as a discreet way for staff to seek guidance and support if they don't feel comfortable discussing it with colleagues.

As a dog friendly office full of lots of dog friendly staff we decided to set up a staff dog walk - bringing the team together for casual get-togethers outside of the office on a regular basis without much planning needed and for staff to come as frequently as they like.

So far staff have been receptive to our everything we have put in place and coming up with some great ideas to add to the agency which we will be taking forward in the near future.

We have more ideas and events coming up this month; Taking inspiration from our learning hub, we will also be introducing ‘43 Recommends’ - Sharing monthly recommendations from our team on social media to extend our ideas and knowledge. A group of the team will also be taking on the Yorkshire 3 Peaks challenge at the end of the month.