We’re delighted to share we’ve been awarded the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA)’s People First Promise, just as Mental Health Awareness Week 2024 kicks off.
This badge of honour represents everything the Salocin Group and its agency brands – Join the Dots, Wood for Trees and Edit – do to ensure mental health and wellbeing is prioritised in the workplace.
In January 2024, the IPA launched its People First Promise initiative, inviting agencies to evidence how they’re supporting staff mental health and wellbeing, segmented into three categories – empower, prevent and support.
Read on to find out how IPA member, Join the Dots, part of the Salocin Group, prioritises mental health at work within these three core pillars.
Empower
To not only empower our teams, but to also support valuable causes and raise awareness of important issues surrounding mental health, we run various activities and encourage engagement business-wide.
For example, during Stress Awareness Month, we ran a company challenge via Strava encouraging employees to be more physically active, which had a positive impact on reducing stress levels.
Similarly, during Mental Health Awareness Week, we’ve planned a group walk for those working in the office or living nearby, followed by cake decorating to get those creative juices flowing.
In addition, we’ve also held bake sales in support of Mind, coffees and chats during Time to Talk Day, group meditation and mindful colouring sessions, and Lego building lunches.
Prevent
We have numerous processes in place to prevent the onset of mental health illness and continuously provide guidance and support to our hardworking teams, to foster a transparent culture and reduce the risk of burnout.
Each week, we send out an ‘emoji check-in’ to see how employees are feeling. If someone responds with a negative emoji, a mental health first aider will swiftly follow up to provide support and try to nip the issue in the bud before it has chance to escalate.
We’ve also put together a series of Spotify playlists based on different feelings to encourage motivation, positivity and calmness.
And we actively encourage all staff to take holiday throughout the year for time out, along with promoting the use of our flexible Friday policy, whereby if employees choose to take half-hour lunches Monday-Thursday, they can take Friday afternoons off for extended weekends.
Support
We provide many services to support anyone in the business prioritise their own mental health, such as:
- 24/7 accessible Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
- Vitality private medical insurance, including self-referral for face-to-face or online counselling, and Headspace membership
- Perkbox Wellbeing Hub access
- £300 lifestyle benefit to spend on something to improve physical or mental health
- Supportive managers who’ve completed a mental health awareness course via iHasco
- Regular employee check-ins, with action plans to prioritise mental health
- Team of trained mental health first aiders to provide ongoing support
Positive impact
With all our efforts to promote mental health awareness and wellbeing within our staff, we’ve created a friendly, open culture where people feel valued, trusted and supported. In turn, this encourages a more focused team to deliver its best work. We’re proud to be awarded the IPA’s People First Promise badge of honour – we wear it with pride!
