Mental Health Awareness Week

With Mental Health Awareness Week starting today, our hints and tips reflect how you can make your organisation more inclusive around mental health.

Normalise Mental Health Conversations

Encourage leadership to speak openly about mental health to reduce stigma. Sharing personal experiences (where appropriate) can have a powerful impact.

You can have all the awareness days in the world, but for mental health we just want to make people feel comfortable to open up and not have any comeback in doing so. Appreciate that in some cultures there is still great taboo in this area.

Promote Access to EAPs

Ensure employees are aware of and can easily access Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs) if you have them, which often offer confidential counselling and well-being support.

Conduct Regular Wellbeing Check-ins

Train managers to hold regular one-to-one check-ins that include well-being/mental health questions - not just performance updates. Really getting to know someone can help them feel more comfortable to open up.

Mental Health First Aiders (MHFA)

Provide MHFA England-accredited training to selected staff to act as points of contact for employees experiencing poor mental health issues. Crucially, ensure this is support for the MHFAs to offload and to deter them from taking on too much – they are there to signpost, not to take on the mental load for others.

Review Workloads and Job Design

It can be so hard especially in manufacturing where budgets are often lean, but aim to ensure workloads are manageable and role expectations are realistic. Chronic stress and burnout are often linked to poor job design.

Offer Flexible Working Options

Support flexible hours, hybrid working, or remote roles where possible to help employees manage stress, work-life balance, and personal responsibilities. Even factory focused roles can have more flexibility built in - for example around annual leave or different shift patterns.

Engage with External Mental Health Charities

Partner with UK organisations like Mind, Rethink Mental Illness, or Time to Change to bring expert-led training, resources, and credibility to your efforts.

A final note: don’t be afraid to evolve things as time moves on. Some things that worked 10 years ago, aren’t necessarily fit for now.

As always if you need credible and pragmatic HR support, please do get in touch with me.