Queensland Mental Health Awareness Week: 6-14 October

With the fast-paced lives we all live these days there’s little wonder that such an emphasis is being made, around the world, to encourage Mental Health Awareness. This week is Queensland’s Mental Health Awareness Week.

Although we all have numerous contributing factors to our mental health you can’t deny that workplace stress can be a large contributor. It’s said that the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime. This equates to approximately 1/3 of our lives.

With this in mind, Employers are now being urged to implement strategies to develop a healthy workplace and promote mental wellbeing.

At Barclay Recruitment, as with any sales environment, the highs and lows can be experienced so intensely and change so quickly. It’s just the nature of the industry. A key component of recruitment is relationship management and therefore employee retention is highly important to us.

As an employer, we realise we can’t abolish or control all workplace stresses, it’s just not reasonable. However, we can implement strategies and allocate “playtime” for our employees to lessen the stress and cultivate an environment where those experiencing difficulties can be identified quickly, acknowledged and helped.

The following initiatives have been successfully part of Barclay Culture for years;

Friday Afternoon Wrap-Up: Whereby as the name suggests, every Friday afternoon for the final hour and a half of the workday we all catch up over snacks and drinks and go over our weeks’ activities.

The Porgeometer: Named after our longest serving staff member and the “Oracle” of the group, George Trusiak. Each morning the team “huddles” and identifies where they rank on the chart. This not only identifies the staff members mental state to their employer but also to their colleagues which in turn has always resulted in an abundance of support and understanding from everyone.

End of Quarter Social: Once every three months the entire company closes for half a day. Employees have the option to join in on team building exercises or take that time to spend with their family or friends. This time is fully paid and doesn’t count towards the employee leave entitlements.

If you give your staff a chance or a time or a venue to laugh and have fun every day, the workplace becomes a fun-place rather than a stressful place.

Laugh, smile, breathe.

As one of our company values says, “It’s not life or death, it’s just business”.

Need help? Find it here https://www.qldmentalhealthweek.org.au/find-help/