This week is Mental Health Awareness Week so we wanted to take the opportunity to share how we ensure mental health is a focus for us internally at Prospectus.
We have a really well-established EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) Working Group at Prospectus made up of people from across the organisation. The core aim of the group is to ensure that Prospectus is an inclusive place to work and that we hear the voices from within on the topics that matter to them. The group decided that there were three key areas that needed focus within Prospectus and, alongside anti-racism and disability, mental health was one.
Mental health is still a subject that many people are reluctant to discuss, particularly poor mental health, but we believe it should be considered in much the same way as physical health. The EDI Group have worked to raise awareness and to educate with a view to removing the stigmas still associated with mental health conditions. One small step we took during the early stages of our focus was to have mental health added to the list of reasons on our personnel database that an employee may need to take health related absence. In the same way that a manager can record an absence as being for flu or a stomach upset for example, they can now record it as related to mental health. We hope that by doing so we are making our colleagues feel more comfortable to discuss their mental health should they need to.
Given that we have created space like this for our colleagues to speak to their managers about mental health conditions, we also realised it is important to provide managers with the guidance they need to better understand mental health conditions. To this end, we have run internal workshops, use our EDI Teams channel to signpost to guidance and a group of our managers recently underwent training from Mental Health at Work which we will build on internally.
To help support our work around mental health, we have also recently signed up to Mental Health at Work’s employer commitment. This has given us a fantastic structure to work to, to ensure that we can really take the work we’re doing to the next level. We’re really looking forward to developing our ongoing action plan, which we will do with the involvement of colleagues with lived experience of mental health conditions.
The theme for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week is anxiety. Here at Prospectus we’ve been sharing lots of guidance on what anxiety is, where people can go for support (for example, our confidential Employee Assistance Programme which can offer professional guidance and counselling) and top tips on how to reduce workplace anxiety.
We’d love to hear from anyone who would like to share their approach to encouraging good mental health in the workplace – we’re still learning and we’re sure there are some fantastic initiatives out there that we haven’t thought of, so please do get in touch!
