Deloitte prioritises the mental health and psychological safety of our people by facilitating an open dialogue about mental health and workplace inclusion, taking steps to minimise work-related stress, as well as providing effective wellbeing supports. Two new recent initiatives have helped us raise the bar even higher.
Project Lead, Rebecca Marshall, explains the background to the first of these two initiatives – Story Slam. "This is an initiative that helps people to define, craft and write their own personal stories, and when we came across it, it seemed like the perfect medium to let our people tell stories of their mental health journeys and their perspective on workplace inclusion.
"With the goal of increasing visibility and facilitating conversations on mental health, we asked our people if they’d be willing to share their stories of mental wellbeing. From the responses we received, four of our people worked with Dublin Story Slam to tell four absolutely absorbing stories."
The four storytellers were professionally videoed – in time for World Mental Health Day on 10 October - and their stories were shared with the entire organisation. The stories related to addiction, bereavement, molar pregnancy and the experience of crippling anxiety.
The four videos of mental wellbeing and workplace inclusion have been watched over 1,000 times, which strongly suggests that the stories resonated with our people and made a difference. We will be repeating the exercise over the coming year, and we hope that even more people will come forward to share their mental health and mental wellbeing stories.
The second initiative that we’ve launched recently around workplace inclusion is called The Elephant In The Room. The social enterprise is the brainchild of Brent Pope, well known broadcaster and staunch mental health advocate. He imported a quantity of four-feet high baby elephants and sold these to companies as a way of highlighting mental health and mental wellbeing – which is so often the unspoken elephant in the room.
Part of the profits from The Elephant In The Room went to the Samaritans, a charity that offers support to those struggling or feeling suicidal. Companies were assigned an artist to paint and decorate their elephant. In the case of Deloitte, our six inclusion networks took ownership of the design.
Named Dóchas (the Irish for hope), our elephant stands inside our canteen in our Dublin office, but also attends various corporate events throughout the year as a reminder, to everyone in the room, to keep the topic of mental health high on the agenda.
