Mental Health Awareness Week

What is mental health?

Mental health is defined as “a state of wellbeing in which every individual realises their potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to their community.”

Mental health affects everyone, we all aim to have good mental health, but just like physical health, our mental health is fluid, changing over time, and we must be mindful of it and how it affects us and those around us.

Mental health has always been an important topic, but the impact of the pandemic, the current war in Ukraine and other issues has catapulted our mental health to the centre of conversations.

How are we supporting mental wellbeing at Bedford?

At Bedford our employee’s mental health is of utmost important to us, we want to ensure that people have the right work/life balance, are happy in their roles and comfortable as part of the company.

Here’s just some of the ways we ensure we are supporting mental wellbeing for our team:

Employee engagement – in-person get togethers, fortnightly pulse surveys, team meetings and one to ones with line managers, as well as informally through regular coffee chats and social interest groups across the company.

One of our most popular initiatives is our #braingym slack channel for the team to share their tips for mental wellness, along with books and podcast recommendations promoting mental wellbeing.

During April we turned Stress Awareness month into Wellbeing month, launching our #wellbeing slack channel and setting everyone a 30-day challenge to focus on their wellbeing for 15 minutes every day. The engagement on both channels has been excellent and it has really helped to engage our remote and dispersed workforce.

Support – We have three trained mental health first aiders within the company and have run a mental health first aid lunch and learn for our line managers. We remove the stigma from sharing mental health problems and encourage our people to be open and honest with their mental health struggles so we can support them. We have also implemented an Employee Assistance Programme, which our employees can contact anonymously and who support with mental health by providing free counselling sessions, along with support for any financial or legal issues they may be facing.

Encouraging movement – Stress is one of the main factors affecting employee’s mental wellbeing. We recently invited wellness expert Sarah Hunt to host a special session on our regular monthly lunch and learns, to talk through what stress is and ways we can reduce it. Sarah taught us some simple breathing, chair yoga and mindfulness techniques that we can all use daily to help us reduce stress and have better mental and physical wellbeing. It was one of our most well attended sessions and we had very positive feedback from the team.

Social interest groups – Our social interest groups have also been a great success in connecting people who have similar interests and hobbies. Our cooking group sets a challenge each week to use two ingredients within a dish and they post photos of their creations and nominate a master chef each quarter. We have some very talented and creative chefs amongst us, so the winner is tough to choose! Our physical activity group set themselves a Strava challenge to clock up the miles and time they do walking, running, cycling and swimming, with weekly and quarterly team winners. (They are a very fit bunch!) Our chess group play weekly online games and challenge us to solve chess puzzles. Finally, our charity and sustainability group have been raising money for multiple charities (15 at last count) and under our colleague Stuart Newton’s guidance, have been planting thousands of trees and bulbs on the Beeline Way in South London to help the environment.

Supporting communities – last summer we bought everyone a picnic rucksack (complete with picnic set and blanket) and encouraged them to get outdoors with friends and family and take a break. We also took part in a Christmas initiative, ‘It’s a Wonderful Post’ where the whole company joined together online to design their own Christmas cards for elderly people around the world who were alone for the holiday season.

The world and working environment may be challenging at times, but we have equipped our employees as best we can, and we offer continual support to ensure they are happy and healthy at Bedford and in their lives.