Supporting the mental health of your employees

Mental Health Awareness Week

For 2023’s Mental Health Awareness Week, we’re getting some inspiration on ways to support employee mental health from some of the fantastic organisations we work with through our free, confidential employee helpline.

Building employee mental health support

Schumacher Packaging’s Head of HR Louise Moody signed up to our helpline in a previous role, and knew it as an effective way to provide support for employees.

She chose to implement the helpline at Schumacher Packaging as the first step in the organisation’s employee wellbeing strategy, ensuring support was available immediately. “We know that members of our team are going through a difficult time right now,” she explains. “The helpline provided a wide range of practical, emotional and financial support options, all of which are needed.”

Complementing existing mental wellbeing initiatives

Paragon provides a range of mental health support in-house for their team. This includes initiatives open to everyone in the organisation, such as the monthly all-company ‘Time Out’ chat, alongside specialist groups headed up by trained volunteers. Newly-launched resources include the WhatsApp-based Let’s Talk Menopause and Men’s Room groups. As well as WhatsApp, members hold a monthly video call to encourage everyone to get together and share experiences and support.

Paragon HR Business Partner and Wellbeing Lead Kim Hill says; “We could see exactly how the helpline would layer additional benefits onto the mental health support we already offer. It provides our team with straightforward access to invaluable resources such as counselling, which we as an organisation can’t provide.”

The helpline’s focus on people in the print industry and allied trades is an important benefit. As Kim added; “The helpline is a key part of our mental health support as it is specifically there for people in our industry.”

Support available at all times

Graham Hunstone, MD of Visual Print & Design uses the helpline as a way to deepen in-house support. “We’ve got a mental health first aider, but if people don’t want to talk to someone in the company then they can contact the helpline.”

Bluetree MD Mark Young, explains why what the helpline offers is ideal for the Bluetree organisation;  “We’re very proud of the work we do internally with our team, but there are a lot of things they are not trained to deal with or don’t have the experience with. That’s where the Printing Charity helpline can really help.”

Since print can be a round-the-clock operation, the 24/7/365 nature of the helpline service is an important benefit. “We run a 24/7 shift here. Having something that we can point our team towards 24 hours a day is incredibly important to us,” says Mark.

2023’s Mental Health Awareness Week theme is ‘anxiety’. For a great range of practical, proven suggestions to help with anxiety visit the Mental Health Foundation website.

The Printing Charity’s helpline can provide practical and emotional support for the causes and feelings of anxiety. Learn more about our helpline, including how to sign up, and hear more about how the helpline works from some of our partners.

Get in touch

If you, or someone you know needs support, or you’d like to know more about our free, confidential helpline, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

To find out more give us a call on 01293 542 820
or click the button below.

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