Team Brean team members took part in Time to Talk Day on 6 February, to talk about mental health.
Too often, mental health problems are treated as a taboo subject – something not to be talked about, especially at work.
However, mental health affects us all and we should feel able to talk about it.
The more conversations we have, the more myths we can bust and barriers we can break down – helping to end the isolation, shame and worthlessness that too many of us feel when experiencing a mental health problem.
One in four of us will experience a mental health problem and 9 in 10 say they have faced negative treatment from others as a result. By choosing to be open about mental health, we are all part of a movement that’s changing the conversation around mental health and ensuring that no one is made to feel isolated or alone for having a mental health problem.
As part of our ongoing commitment to this, we supported Time to Talk Day in a number of ways. Firstly we put a ban on internal emails for the whole day across all levels of the business. It is so easy to just send an email so this meant our colleagues had to pick up the phone and engage in a conversation or take a walk to go and find the person. This was received as an excellent opportunity to do less typing and more talking!
At our managers meeting before the day we discussed the time to talk day and tried out some conversation starters and activities from the time to talk website. Our managers were then tasked to try these activities on the day with them team and lots of conversions took place.
Sarah House Director commented ‘As a family business we want everyone who works here to feel they can be open about their mental health, and ask for support if they need it. Time to talk day helped us bring mental health to forefront and have meaningful conversations with our teams. It also helped us to remind our team of where they can go to for assistance including our own trained mental health first aider and access to a 24 hour employee assistance phone line for themselves and their family members. We also hold a health and well-being event in the Summer for our team to get information of well-being including mini health checks and initiatives from eating healthily and quitting smoking