How Royal Mail is implementing a five year healthy minds strategy
In October 2017 we launched our five-year mental health strategy ‘Because Healthy Minds Matter’ which further strengthens our support for the mental health of our employees. The strategy has four aims – increase the awareness of mental health conditions, decrease the stigma, signpost to tools and support and to ensure our people know where to go in a crisis.
Our Chief Executive Officer has signed the ‘Time to Change’ pledge, publicly committing our intentions. We also support the ‘Heads Together Campaign’ and our charity partners for the next three years (2017 to 2020) are Action for Children (the primary partner), Mind, and Mental Health UK.
Our leadership team at Royal Mail is committed to our work on mental health and we work hard at engaging with both business and union colleagues. Education is a key part of our strategy and we designed and launched a mental health e-learning module which nearly 10,000 managers have now completed. We are now extending the e-learning to all employees via our Feeling First Class Wellbeing Portal.
Many of our managers, pilot ambassadors and Safety, Health and Environment team have attended the Mental Health First Aid Awareness Course and we continue to offer more courses in 2018.
Whilst we use multi-media communications campaigns we also receive great feedback on our handy portable communications for example around 80,000support z-cards sent to all units nationally to share with our employees. We have launched a Mental Health Ambassador Pilot to harness local peer to peer support and will be reviewing the pilot later in the year. 2018 sees continued work and investment in the mental health of our employees.
Our people are at the heart of our business and this is reflected in our fantastic ‘Everyday People’ film – please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8RCFtTQ-xE.
Alongside these commitments, we are keen to use both the direct and indirect opportunities presented within our business to help people who are affected by mental health conditions. As part as of this we have worked with Mental Health UK and our other two charity partners Action for Children and Mind to offer seasonal Christmas jobs and other short work placements to some of the people they support. We are proud to continue to provide this as part of our continued partnership with all three of them.
Rachel Boon
Head of Health and Wellbeing
Royal Mail Group Safety, Health and Environment
