In May we celebrated Mental Health Awareness week at Stuart and decided to join the Mental Health Foundation effort to reflect on Kindness, the theme chosen by the Foundation this year. 

At Stuart, we encourage everyone to speak up about these topics. To give a bit of context, the wellbeing of our employees is a very important part of our company culture and our team values. Especially for the HR Team, wellbeing is one of our priorities. Mental health is just as important as physical health, which is why we designed and implemented a program last year aiming to raise awareness on mental health related-topics, by creating an open and empathetic environment where conversations around mental health are supported and accepted by all staff members.

This is one of our office posters displayed to raise awareness about mental health

Putting wellbeing first

Today, we are proud to share a few encouraging results such as:

  • We have at least one trained mental health first aider per country

Our trained colleagues offer help to any employee as a first point of contact, until professional help is received.

  • We can rely on a dynamic slack channel where colleagues share their feelings and learnings

One of our ways to ensure open communication is sharing helpful tips, resources, motivational quotes and our experience here. The channel has now over 80 participants and has created a great sense of union. 

  • We ran a time management & stress session in each country

This helped us gain skills and knowledge on how to be better at managing  our time and how to manage the stress we sometimes feel in a work environment.

  • We've added more coverage to our private health insurance, as well as mindfulness sessions and other wellbeing activities to help every team member favour a good state of mind

Spreading positivity

Especially during COVID-19 and its impact on our society in general, this program is more important than ever, so we need to thank all the team members involved in the success of these initiatives, which help us to create a better Stuart work environment every day! 

During this Mental Health Awareness week, we decided to encourage everyone to reflect about Kindness at work, at home and within their community, following the examples given by the Mental Health Foundation.

We also asked everyone to be active 30 minutes each day as part of being kind to themselves. This included running, walking or even gardening. To encourage and bring attention to this cause, we asked our teams to achieve, as Stuart collective, 120 hours of crowd-sourced exercising! 

We shared the photos and feelings on our #healthymind slack channel and used the hashtags #KindnessMatters and #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek when posting about it on our social media. At the end of the week we recorded over 400 hours of exercise, 233% more than what we had aimed for! 

However, this week was not only about sharing some pictures and feelings but also about making our teams more conscious of how we treat ourselves and others. We learned about self-compassion through colleagues sharing their experiences, as well as through resources shared by the HR team. We could see through the challenge that spending time focusing on ourselves helped us to feel better mentally. We appreciated and learned that sharing the down moments with colleagues makes us feel strong and supported. 

Thank you for sharing this with HUMILITY and through COOPERATION. This makes me super proud of my colleagues and what we together achieve at all levels. 

We [Stuart] strive to help people become the best version of themselves!

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