Founder Stories: Champion Health- The Importance of Mental Health Awareness At Work
As we’ve gone into a third lockdown this month, we feel it is as important as ever to keep mental health and wellbeing at the forefront of people’s minds. We wanted to highlight this interview between TwinklHive’s Resident Growth Manager Em Scicluna and Champion Health CEO and Founder Harry Bliss, carried out in November 2020. Harry Bliss spoke about the mental health implications of lockdown and the importance of workplace wellbeing. Read below to see:
Champion Health, a start-up being accelerated through TwinklHive, is helping to change and save lives by providing workplaces with mental health training and helping employers to make impactful workplace health strategies.
Q1: This month has seen England enter the second country-wide lockdown — what effect has this lockdown had on the mental health of people across the country?
A: This has had arguably a greater negative impact on wellbeing than the initial lockdown, the impact of which was partially alleviated by good weather and community spirit. This time around, in the colder months fewer people are catching up over the garden fence and more people are staying indoors for longer. Hopefully the good news around the vaccine has brought some hope, but this lockdown has overall been tougher for a lot of people, especially those that have been furloughed multiple times.
Q2: What can people do to protect their own mental health and support the mental health and wellbeing of other people during this time?
A: The word “protect” is really key, we need to look after our mental health whilst it’s good. We all have mental health and we need to look after it whether it’s good or whether we’re struggling. Where possible, we should avoid dwelling on the many factors outside of our control. Especially with the virus, we have no control over the government policy in response to the virus and so we shouldn’t dwell on these factors that are out of our control. The saying “controlling the controllables” really resonates with me. Those factors we have control over including our exercise habits, our nutrition, our sleeping behaviours, the hours that we work; they are all really important to look after our mental health. It’s about improving our mental health by focusing on those factors we do have control of.
Social connection is so important — we still need to maintain that social connection even though it can be hard on Zoom and video calls, especially whilst we are in lockdown. We need to do everything we can to improve and maintain our social interactions, so whether that’s picking up the phone and speaking to a friend or a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while, keeping those connections going in this time of social isolation is so crucial. Lockdown should mean physical distancing, not social distancing. It’s also really important to seek help from someone you trust as early as possible if you’re struggling, stopping symptoms from manifesting into something worse.
Q3: What can employers do in the workplace to support their team members, and why is this important?
A: I’m a business owner myself and it’s imperative for me to look after my team from a moral case. The business case is also stronger than ever — workplace health needs to be at the heart of our organisations because it ties in so closely to productivity and to the bottom line of business. Workplace health is not a nice to have anymore, it’s not an afterthought. It needs to be at the heart of organisations. Poor mental health can lead to poor concentration and the greater risk of mistakes happening.
Wellbeing solutions should be preventative and proactive. Proactive solutions look at one hundred percent of the workforce by focusing on how to keep people well and get people well if they are struggling. A lot of workplace health at the moment is reactive, reacting to problems that are occurring, and at that point it is so much harder to engage the individual and get them into a healthy state. There is a need to focus on all employees, having prevention and early intervention at the heart of any strategy.
We must also seek to understand the wellbeing of our teams and stop using absence data as a guide. Absence data is a really poor indicator of wellbeing. During the pandemic, wellbeing has worsened yet absence rates have dropped — people are working longer hours, not taking time off and are more worried about their jobs; people feel they can’t afford to be seen to take days off at risk of losing their job, but at a sacrifice to their health. We should seek to be data driven where possible, using more reliable forms of data.
Q4: What impact do you think the effects of coronavirus will have on the demand for a product like Champion Health, which makes employees more aware of the signs and effects of poor mental health?
A: Whilst it’s taken a pandemic for many organisations to wake up to how important wellbeing is, for now and the long term, wellbeing is not a trend. It has to be imperative to any organisation that wants to be high performing. We see the pandemic as a big turning point in taking workplace wellbeing seriously.
Q5: In a time when many companies are having to scale back, Champion Health’s team is expanding — how have things changed for your team over the past few months?
A: We’re being careful not to profiteer off the pandemic, but demand has increased by around one thousand percent. We’ve also had the amazing investment partnership with TwinklHive which has accelerated our growth significantly and allowed us to grow our team by three times.
We’ve worked very hard to be in this position but we also feel very fortunate as we understand many businesses are scaling back. We believe this is just the start for Champion Health, especially with the new product launching March 2021.
If you or your company is looking for advice on how to best support the mental health and wellbeing of yourself or your employees, please head to Champion Health for more information. Lockdown poses a difficult time for many, please be kind to yourself and seek support from friends, family or health professionals.
At TwinklHive we understand that entrepreneurship can be lonely at best of times, only to be currently exacerbated by the lockdown restrictions. To combat this, we are launching our own digital networking group at the end of the month. As part of our pledge to keep social interactions alive, we hope the networking group will be a place for like minded entrepreneurs and founders to connect. To register your interest and join the group please sign up here.
