Carrying on the conversation for Mental Health Awareness Week 2024
For this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week we’re proud to have facilitated a number of activities and events to engage with our teams and promote a positive attitude to mental health and wellbeing.
Mental Health Awareness Week is an annual, nationwide event – supported by the Mental Health Foundation, Mind and Mental Health First Aid England – which runs from 13th to 19th May 2024, aiming to promote the importance of good mental health and increasing public understanding of its challenges.
As an employer we take great pride in providing our staff with access to a wide range of initiatives to support their mental and physical health. Such initiatives have formed as part of our integrated cross-company Mental Wellbeing Support Strategy, something which has secured us a number of awards in recent years as we celebrate our commitment to mental health and wellbeing.
This year, in support of Mental Health Awareness Week, we took the decision to run a programme of activities and events to encourage our teams to take positive steps towards their own mental health while also providing the necessary tools to do so. Take a look below to see what our teams got up to over the week.
Company wide stand down
To kick things off, we asked all employees across the business to set down their tools and close their laptops for 30 minutes, taking part in our company-wide stand down. We hosted a number of toolbox talks and breakfast briefings to encourage our teams to take a pause from their duties to learn about the importance of connecting with their ‘whole self’ as a way of looking after their mental wellbeing.
Grab a brew and take five
For the following day, we encouraged our teams to connect with their colleagues, subcontractors family or friends by catching-up over a brew and taking five. Operations and support staff were fuelled with strong coffee and a variety of sweet treats, but it was the conversation that mattered the most.
Get up and get out
In honour of this year’s theme of ‘Movement: Moving more for our mental health’, we hosted a walking session at Attenborough Nature Reserve for our head office team – with our Regional and Site teams encouraged to host similar sessions where and when they could. While many individuals in our industry might consider their job to be active, finding movement in daily tasks separate from work such as walking the dog and taking the long route home, can make a mountain of difference to our overall wellbeing.
For Managing Director, John McCann, Mental Health Awareness Week serves as a reminder of the importance of prioritising mental health for our overall wellbeing, while also enabling us to support employees with a wide range of mental health support initiatives.
“One of our core values is the health, safety and wellbeing of our workforce and to this end we are fully invested in Mental Health Awareness Week,”
“As an organisation we want to empower our employees to bring their whole self to work. We know teams that feel safe and connected work better together, and we understand that our people are at their most effective and creative when everybody feels safe, seen, heard and valued,”
He adds, “Mental Health Awareness Week is an ideal time for us all to focus on our own mental health, tackle stigma, and find out how we can create an industry and workplace that prevents mental health problems from developing and protects our mental wellbeing.”
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