Mental wellbeing is our ability to perform day-to-day tasks and responsibilities, enjoy the activities in our lives and overall function as a person. Quite an important factor of our existence, isn’t it?
Our mental health is influenced by a range of factors, including our work life.
The happiness in the workplace can be reflected into numbers. According to Deloitte survey every £1 investment in mental health by employers brings back £5. Talking about outstanding return of investment (ROI)!
Research has shown that rates of leaveism and presenteeism are rising – these two notions are closely linked to employee burnout, which can result in employers losing highly outstanding talent.
The matter of mental wellbeing is not solely personal struggle and shouldn’t be treat as a talent management or personal issue. The more successful ones are the companies that treat mental health as a broader organisational challenge.
One such company is Vinted. They have recognised the responsibility as an employer to educate people about mental wellbeing, creating an environment within the organisation where employees feel empowered to talk about their mental state and are supported along the way.
We talked with Jolita, the People Experience Partner at Vinted, about the company’s commitment to their “We care” value. How do they address mental health issues in the workplace? On what remedies do they focus on that help with burnout, anxiety, or stress? Read more to find out.
INTERVIEW
What was the biggest impulse for Vinted to focus more on mental health?
In Vinted culture “We care” is a very important value. At some point, we always had this in our behaviours: emotional intelligence, importance to speak about stress – or negative also positive emotions – was not new for us. It was quite a strong part of our ways of working together.
An impulse to have a more structured strategy on mental health, also tools and available professional support when needed, was given by the first Covid-19 wave. When the unknown was coming and we understood we needed to be prepared to give all the possible support to our people.
What have you accomplished so far?
As the lockdown started, being perceived not as a short-term crisis, but rather a continuous change of our lives, the world started to speak more about the importance of continuous work on mental health hygiene.
We also felt the same – to stay resilient and grow, when the world is trembling, you need to be healthy. This is why we started to build a long-term mental health strategy and started collaborating with external partner Mindletic.
The mental health strategy provides the support, but are employees confident to seek help, or do you still see a stigma there?
It’s hard to answer concretely about the stigma. In general, we feel that Vinted people are showing great support and proactivity in mental health topics: employees are suggesting workshops, speakers we should invite or programmes they would like to have.
We can feel that people are open about this topic: they are open to say they want more knowledge/training in this topic or that they need help. Our team members are open to share their experiences as well.
Still, I believe this topic is very complex and has many layers, sometimes unconscious biases – but these can be overcome by working on it and learning together. We choose to go this way. 😊
Vinted started to collaborate with Mindletic to focus on prevention activities to support the wellbeing of the team. Please describe the partnership and how this helps to maintain lively mental health?
Mainly, staying conscious about mental and emotional health is the very first and important step.
We believe Mindletic helps to create this rutinue: to stop for a second and think how I feel. This helps the person to create a habit of reflection. Also, it might help to realise that something is not ok and more serious steps should be taken to maintain healthy life, productivity, meaningful relationships.
Midletic also supports knowledge and professional consultations, if the first signs of feeling not well occurs. Some examples that we have implemented:
💡 Emotion diary
💡 Breathing exercises
💡 Individual video sessions with certified professionals
💡 Community rooms, including a personalised Vinted room to share knowledge about emotional health
In the innovative startup ecosystem, it’s quite common to have the “always on” working culture. Is sending emails during your holidays and late nights frowned upon in Vinted?
At the moment, we do have a flexible hours policy at Vinted. Research shows that different people are productive during different hours of the day. Also, we believe that flexible working hours are very important for those team members who have families.
So, this is why sometimes we get emails during strange hours. Still, I believe that Vinted is far from “always on” culture, even if we have strong aiming high culture.
And we want to work on staying in a balanced way – to learn how to stay productive and healthy, not stressed and busy, even if we are trying to achieve bigger and bigger goals.
The previous question was inspired by the fact that there are plenty of companies that have a healthy working environment vision, but it does not come across in real life. Mostly because the management team does not lead as an example. “You cannot be, what you cannot see” – do you agree with this? What are the main obstacles in initiating and embedding culture change?
Yes, I fully agree with this statement.
In our case, I believe that the main obstacle in building a healthy routine might be our aiming high culture: Vinted has an amazing mission and we, as a community, stand for the sustainable future. We are happy to work with the plan to take care of our world, believe in the way we chose to do that and this motivation sometimes might come first.
And we, as a team, need to learn how to achieve these amazing and inspiring goals by taking care of ourselves. To achieve what we want we must be healthy – otherwise we won’t be able to achieve it.
Talking about the management team, we are happy that our leaders are not saying that they already have all the knowledge and habits to balance between high goals and healthy routine – they choose to learn this together with all the company. They choose to be role models and say when it’s hard for them or when they made a mistake. The management team also chooses to be transparent about what helps them to stay productive and happy.
According to Deloitte survey every £1 investment in mental health by employers brings back £5. The ROI is one way to look at it. How is Vinted measuring the effectiveness of the new mental wellbeing strategy?
We believe the way we measure the success of a wellbeing strategy will be a decreasing level of experienced stress at work and engagement with our proposed initiatives (training, tools, etc).
An unlikely pandemic silver lining is that we talk about stigmatised mental wellbeing more. If our readers would want to evaluate their stress levels, what are the main questions to ask yourself?
❔ Do I feel motivated and focused?
❔How often do I laugh? Celebrate small victories?
❔ Am I happy with the quality of sleep and physical health in general?
❔ How often do I experience raising thoughts and constant worry?
❔ How often do I feel anger, irritability, restlessness?
