Mental Health Awareness Month at HoneyBook
May is Mental Health Awareness month in the United States. Here at HoneyBook, we aim to support the mental health and wellbeing of our employees year-round. In May, we carve out a few special opportunities to bring more conversations to life. In doing so, we foster an environment that is welcoming and inclusive for all employees to dig deeper into various topics around mental health and wellness.
This year’s theme was “Together for Mental Health”. We’re excited to pull back the curtain for a peek into how we brought these conversations to life and offered some new resources to support each employee’s individual journeys.
Every month, we host a Wellness Session for our employees. This involves bringing in an external expert to talk with our team about a topic surrounding health, wellness, and mental wellbeing. In these sessions, our team can learn new tools, tips, and frameworks to incorporate into their day to day lives. We aim for these to be easily accessible to all employees and they are hosted virtually so every member of the team, no matter where they work, can attend.
This month’s session was Don’t Tell Me To Relax with Sophie Riegel. Sophie’s talk provided an opportunity to learn how to start and continue having healthy conversations around mental health — it was the perfect way to kick off Mental Health Awareness month. The team learned best practices we can all take with us to help create a safe, supportive environment across all teams here at HoneyBook and beyond the workplace.
In thinking about Mental Health Awareness month, we knew we had to do more than just talk the talk. We want to walk the walk. To do so, we launched three brand new perks that are entirely free for all members of our team.
The first new perk we rolled out is a paid subscription to Calm, the leading app for mental fitness. Our team members have begun using Calm for guided meditations, curated playlists to help focus during work, and to aid in better sleep. We’re seeing a lot of excitement around this new perk and can’t wait to see how each unique journey is supported by this tool.
After announcing Calm to the team, we were thrilled to share that we are also providing a paid subscription to TalkSpace. TalkSpace is an online therapy service on a mission to connect each user with a dedicated, licensed therapist in the format that works best for them. Our team can now call, text, or video chat with a therapist as-needed. We are so excited to bring TalkSpace’s mission of removing the stigma around mental health care to our team.
In thinking about wellness, we wanted to ensure that we are supporting all tenets of our team’s lives. We chose to partner with OneEleven to offer financial wellness services to our employees! Our team can now partner with OneEleven’s team of financial wellness experts to feel more confident and at ease about their unique financial goals. To us, feeling less stress around finances is a big part of wellness and peace of mind — so we are so excited to provide this opportunity to the team.
Outside of offering these amazing perks, we wanted to keep the conversation lively all month long. Our People Team regularly shared prompts in our company slack channels to create a space for our employees to openly chat. We believe that each employee has something to share and we can all learn from each other — so that’s exactly what we did! These prompts got our employees talking about their favorite mindfulness practices and even encouraged everyone to take a walk during their busy day to get some fresh air and share some photos of their local walking routes. It was truly a delight to get a glimpse into these moments of our employees taking time for themselves.
Here at HoneyBook, we know our employees are happiest when they have the tools and resources they need to invest in their wellbeing. Between now and next May, our team will have access to a handful of incredible benefits to support their personal wellness. We believe we are here to support each person on our team and always go the extra mile to create an environment where they can truly feel their best. It’s been a deeply rewarding month and it’s just the beginning.
