Mental Health Awareness Week may have ended, but the team at Wellbeing at Work think it is crucial to keep the conversations ongoing! With this, we caught up with some of our Wellbeing Champions who have done some remarkable work during the week to raise awareness of anxiety and Mental Health in the workplace.
Kath Hendrick, Engagement Coordinator and Wellbeing Champion at the Co-op arranged a few activities for her and the rest of the Wellbeing Champion team to get involved in to promote mental health at the Co-op. This gave them an opportunity for conversations about mental health with their colleagues. In addition, it gave them time to connect with others and take time out from their usual workload.
We had a few volunteers from our Wellbeing Champion Team who did the ‘Walk and Talk’ activities throughout the week. We performed this as a daily check-in in the warehouse to ensure our other team members were aware of our presence around the warehouse. However, it also gave them the opportunity to go for a short walk around the block and have a chat should they want to. This helped their physical and mental health! By doing it this way, there was no pressure on our colleagues to talk about mental health, as there is another purpose to the activity, but if anything popped up, our Wellbeing Champions were equipped with some signposting and information to help
My role for the week was spending time in our Wellbeing Room. I facilitated a general blood pressure check with our machine and inviting colleagues to have a ‘health check’. I’m no expert, but I had a chart that showed what was normal and what needed to be seen by a medical professional. This was for further medical help if it arose. With that, I encouraged a couple to get further checks by referring them to pharmacies that offer a free blood pressure check. This was really just to create another environment for someone to safely chat should they wish to. Our wellbeing room is quiet and we always ensure it is a safe place for people to reach out.
Lastly because the majority of our workforce is male and many guys love football, in our team meetings, I shared a short video of Joe Bryan who had done some interviews opening up about his mental health and how anxiety can sometimes affect him. The team found this very interesting, and it gave the room some space for healthy conversations around mental health. It also helped others see that everyone can be affected by mental health – it doesn’t discriminate. As well, during our team meeting, we also did an activity from Connect 5, called the balloon exercise, which others found interesting as it showed them what anxiety symptoms may feel like – some who don’t get anxiety particularly thought it useful to know!
Kath and the rest of the Co-op team also ensured that they promoted mental health awareness week by having a #WearItGreenDay, see above with Kath and two other wellbeing champions sporting the green – Kelly Baugh and Steve Hendrick!
Mental health can be promoted in all sorts of ways to raise awareness and make space for healthy conversations about mental health. In addition, it gives people the opportunity to talk if they need to and the Co-op team have done just that! Well done Kath and the rest of the team for raising awareness of such a crucial topic!
The Co-op are active within our Wellbeing Champion Programme as well as successfully achieving our Bronze Award for Wellbeing at Work Awards, implementing those important wellbeing initiatives into the organisation!
