Starting a conversation about Mental Health and Wellbeing at Lancia

At LanciaConsult we take pride in the care we take of each other and encouraging awareness around mental health and wellbeing is a real focus. We want to give our team the tools to understand and learn about looking after their mental wellness. To do this Holly, supported by others in the team at Lancia has formed a mental health and wellbeing group. Here, we ask Holly what it’s all about.

(Holly is the wonderful lady in the middle of the picture above).  

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Q: What is the role of the mental health and wellbeing group at Lancia?
A: I think we are facilitators. We’re a group of peers across Lancia who simply want to create a space to allow people to feel comfortable to talk, and we facilitate the conversation. We bring the team into this space, to encourage open, honest and continuous discussion on all the many topics that make up Mental Health and Wellbeing.  

We want to use this space to create awareness and to educate the team on the importance of our mental health and wellness in and outside of the office.  

I think it’s also important for me to share that our role is NOT to replace professional channels, and not to give one sole direction or solution for people. We identify various options for the team to consider, we share different tools and knowledge on how to best make decisions that are the best for them.

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‍Q. What do the mental health and wellness team offer Lancia?
A: I think the most important thing we offer is – visible allyship.  

We are a dedicated mental health and wellbeing team among peers. We want to provide consistent support, in a trusting environment that we are continually trying to evolve.  

We also have three mental health first aid trained team members. These people offer a safe and credited channel should our team want to use it.  

Then of course, during monthly sessions we offer researched learnings on important topics, like anxiety and stress in the workplace, psychological safety at work, burnout and how to look after your body and mind to ensure you can bring your best self to work. We talk about these topics on a regular basis, because we want to empower the team with useful knowledge and inspire them to always speak out about mental health and wellbeing – after all our mental health and wellbeing is every day, not only the days when it can choose to rear its head.

If we can normalise these conversations at Lancia we can empower one another to seek the help they need or simply learn to imbed these conversations into our everyday lives – it’s so important to check in with one another and ourselves!

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Q: Why is this initiative important for Lancia?
A: Being a relatively young company in Europe we got the opportunity to start this initiative, and to grow and nurture this group how we thought best, and we are so proud to champion this for Lancia!  

We felt it was important for Lancia to have this group to be people that we work and chat with every day. We want to soften these ‘taboo’ topics to be as comfy to talk about as possible and we love that this group are accountable for promoting great employee mental health and wellbeing at Lancia.

And of course, as a consultancy, we need to be transparent with our consultants about everyday life in an office, working with clients, working on multiple projects and how to balance work and personal life. We recognise that the pace of consulting varies, sometimes your project or workload is lighter and often it can be fast paced and has the potential to become stressful.  

We want to help prepare each employee, new consultants joining the company and experienced consultants who have been in the profession for years, to be able to spot the signs of states like stress and to be able to prevent or manage it in a healthy way.  

It’s our job as a company but also as the mental health group to equip the team with the right tools to feel balanced through all the paces of consulting and, to thrive in this industry because, that’s what work should be about.

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‍Q: As a business how do you think Lancia supports the team with mental health?
A: As a wider company, Lancia trust the mental health and wellness team to shape and drive how we want to make ourselves available to the team.  

We are fortunate to have sponsorship from the leadership team to action new initiatives both financially but also tangibly where they will lead by example to help us create a fully transparent space.

The mental health and wellbeing team often provide top tips on the selected topic of the month or session. For example, we have previously discussed how to improve our focus and productivity at work. Associated with this is considering how we use our time outside of work too. So, simply turning off our email, or work-related app notifications once we leave the office is a fantastic way to ensure that when we’re meant to be switching off and relaxing, that we are. AND importantly all our leadership team really, really encourage us to do this! We see that they’re offline outside of the office, we see their working hours clearly displayed in their diary, we see the Do-not-Disturb notification on their profiles. They share simple guidance with us like,  

‘Set your agenda for the following week on a Friday afternoon for a Monday, not Sunday night!”  

“If you need to work past 6, do it, but if you don’t, don’t!”

“When you go on holiday, you’re on holiday – turn off all work notifications and enjoy the down time”

Having this shared to the team from ‘the top down’ is valuable. It takes away a lot of uncertainties of what is actually expected of you at work. Phew!

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‍Q: What do you think are the benefits to working for a business that has such a genuine understanding of mental health and wellness?
A: There are several things that come to mind...

Firstly, I think we’re breaking down the barriers to help people to talk openly about their mental health & wellbeing, especially in the workplace where people can feel that they should only bring their professional and ‘best selves’ to work, but this isn’t the case – we encourage the team to bring all of themselves, we appreciate that certain things circulating our minds don’t just disappear because we’ve walked through the big blue door to the office, and actually they may even become worse in this circumstance.  

Secondly, I believe that we follow through on our purported values. We don’t just use words - it’s genuine care. Even outside of the team, we are so lucky to have a nurturing culture where all employees care about how your day is going, how your family or your partner is, what you’re up to at the weekend, they check in on you after they know you’ve had a rough week, after you panicked during a presentation, you couldn’t motivate yourself one day to tick off all the frogs from your to do list… and I think that’s pretty special.

Over the coming weeks, on this blog, Holly will be sharing more of the work of our mental health group. We’ll be looking at Lancia tips for boosting focus and productivity, finding the right work-life balance, understanding sleep hygiene, recognising and avoiding burnout and psychological safety at work. We’re hoping that sharing this work wider will benefit others and keep the conversation going.  

If you’d like to learn more about working with Lancia and joining a genuinely, people focussed team. Find out more about starting your career with us.