hello and welcome back to my channel before i leave bloomsbury publishing i thought it'd be
rude not to mention all the things that they do to support employees mental health i hope
this video gives other publishers some ideas and set some examples of what you could be doing to
support your colleagues first of all we have the mental health network this was set up before i
joined bloomsbury but i am currently a member of it it's basically just the same area where we meet
monthly or bi-monthly to talk about any issues that we have any ideas to support employees and
anyone can bring any questions or queries to us bloomsbury as well as our generous annual
leave they also give us two well-being days you can use this for anything you like i've
used one of them so far and i used it to go take myself away for the weekend
for a long weekend and basically just focus on mindfulness and mental health and i think
it's really nice to have that separation between a mental well-being personal well-being day and
annual leave so that's just we get two of those a year so that's really good and then obviously
linking onto that we have a generous amount of annual leave holiday allowance as i mentioned
which can obviously help people have a bit of a breather from the workplace when it was mental
health awareness week bloomsbury put on events throughout the week whether it was all for talks
meditation exercises yoga anything like that i attended all of these events and i vlogged it so i
will leave that in the description box down below so you can check out what we did in that week one
of the more recent things is bloomsbury allowed 16 of us to become a mental health first aider so we
went on a two day long intensive course from a third party so mental health first aid england
and they taught us all about different mental illnesses how to deal with them in a first aid
emergency crisis which i genuinely found so so useful and we've come away with a huge manual
that we can refer to in the future following from that we mentioned that we didn't want that to be a
one-off and then that's it we're doing things as a result of that so we're gonna have lanyards to
distinguish who we are so people can come to us if they're in any sort of crisis or emergency those
ideas following on from that course such as action and wellness plans emergency plans for individual
people that we're going to work on so it was definitely beneficial for those two days but
also moving forward we also have something called the employee assistance program again this is a
third party but it's basically free counselling for all staff so you can join the EAP the employee
assistance program you can have phone calls you can email them whatever it's basically just a free
service for us employees if we're struggling if we want to talk about absolutely anything
whether it's work related home related anything like that we then have author talks so when we're
in the office the authors would normally come into the conservatory and you'd book a little slot
and sit in the conception and you listen to them talk obviously blues we publish a range of books
so sometimes they are inspirational talks talking about mental well-being anything along those lines
mindfulness etc that gives us the employees the chance to listen to someone that's more
professional and has written a whole book about it and sometimes as well you can get a free copy of
the book since the pandemic we also have flexible working hours which a lot of companies are taking
on this initiative but i think that obviously just helps if people are having a particularly
bad mental health morning then they can sort of start later finish later although we get a really
generous discount as employees we also have some downloadable pdfs that our hr facilities depart
department have provided for us that's on our internal systems and their pdfs based on some
of our books that are following mental health and mental wellbeing these are also mentioned on our
intranet and we have a lot of other resources on our intranet too links to the employee assistance
assistance program for example but so many other things on there so that's on our internal internet
called the internet we also have a company doctor so a general practitioner this means
if we're having any concerns if we're stressed or anything we can book an appointment with him
and see if there's anything that they can do about it from a medical point of view when we're in the
office we also had a company masseuse which was amazing you can just book a 15 20 minute session
you go down break from your work go down to the massage room and get a free massage on the company
which obviously helps relieve stress and all that sort of thing and definitely am missing that now
that we're working from home we also have a new diversity inclusion manager to represent the whole
of bloomsbury who's doing a lot to support mental health and then finally we have training and
support for line managers again following on from that first aid training that we did we recognized
that line managers are the ones that perhaps need a little bit more support to support the people
that they're managing i think blue industry as a whole are quite understanding when it comes
to mental health we have that network there and they're normally quite good if we suggest an idea
i think that it makes a huge difference to your job satisfaction everyone knows that i love my job
and working for bloomsbury and this is a huge huge part of it because i feel safe and i feel like my
mental health can be supported working there and i think that is so so important i hope that some
people from other publishing houses will see this and give them a bit of an idea of what they can be
doing to support their employees mental health as well for now i hope that kind of inspired
you i hope that you found that interesting but yeah that's what bloomsbury are doing to support
employees mental health even if it's just me alone i definitely really really appreciate it