Mental Health Awareness Week

Blanchards Bailey is strongly committed to ensuring good mental health and well-being in the workplace. As part of this, the firm is joining others in supporting the Mental Health Foundation’s awareness campaign over the week of 9th-15th May 2022, particularly around the theme of loneliness.

The firm’s Head of HR, Jane Cordner, provides expert advice to business clients on how they can best look after their employees' mental health and offers examples of how the firm puts that advice into practice:

Looking after your employees’ well-being should now, more than ever, be a key priority. Modern day life pressures, coupled with challenges presented by the pandemic, have left many feeling anxious, lonely and depressed. Signs of this in the workplace include decreased productivity, morale problems, lack of engagement, absenteeism, presenteeism, complaints of tiredness, complaints of aches and pains, and alcohol/drug misuse.

The good news is that there are a number of tools and strategies that employers can adopt to proactively manage health and well-being in the workplace. These include:

• ensuring you have a well-being policy.
• developing a supportive culture by training mental health first aiders, educating line managers in recognising the symptoms of anxiety and stress, and running self-awareness workshops for staff.
• providing easily accessible resources for staff which include self-help information as well as useful telephone numbers and links to websites.
• providing access to an employee assistance programme which includes advice for maintaining and improving health as well as a counselling service that can be accessed free of charge.
• signing up to the Wellbeing Charter or other recognised mental health champions to access current research and training.
• carrying out regular staff surveys/stress audits to retain awareness of the overall mental wellbeing of your workforce.

Blanchards Bailey has worked hard to build a supportive culture internally over the last few years. Actions taken during this time include;

• signing up to the Wellbeing Charter.
• sourcing an Employee Assistance Programme that not only supports ongoing good physical health but provides an online resource base for mental health which includes the option of attending up to eight free counselling sessions.
• creating mental health champions who have been given formal mental health awareness training.
• developing a set of mental health resources and signposting for staff to access.
• delivering mental well-being sessions to all staff.
• ensuring opportunities for informal networking and teamworking are provided across the Firm.

Over the last few months, a lot of planning and preparation has been undertaken to formalise our hybrid and flexible working practices. We recognise that staff value the option to work from home at times, but also benefit hugely from having contact in the office. We are very proud of our team working culture and are responding to the growing demand from staff to be back in regular face to face contact rather than working in isolation. The resulting buzz in the offices is amazing.

For all HR enquiries and advice please contact Jane Cordner on 01258 459361.