2:06pm Wednesday 10th February 2010
By Wellbeing At Work
Stay Well - Stay Working. That was the message when the Richmond Fellowship Work Life team spent the day at West Swindon Shopping Centre on Thursday 4th February – no, this wasn’t some form of retail therapy, we wanted to get out into the community and raise awareness of mental health issues at work, as well as offering our support and guidance services to people currently experiencing stress, anxiety or depression in the workplace.
During the day, those statistics about 1 in 4 people experiencing mental ill health, seemed a little underestimated. Not surprisingly, the economic downturn has left a lot of people feeling worried about their futures and this often leads to stress and anxiety. There is a terrible vicious circle as anxiety affects performance, which can lead to capability reviews, which leads to more anxiety, which leads to poor performance, which leads to.....and so on.
It’s clear that there is a growing awareness of the need to address the problems associated with stress at work but more needs to be done to get everyone up to speed and doing something. Hopefully, we were helping to do just that.
Despite the serious nature of the message, it was great fun meeting and talking to people. Children seemed to like our freebie badges and balloons, even though we couldn’t arrange for them to be filled with helium, (because they weren’t up to spec!), and mums and dads took our hessian shopping bags, giving us a self-satisfied 'saving the environment' glow.
Our thanks to the West Swindon Centre Management Team and staff for ensuring our day went smoothly, also to the retailers in the centre who agreed to display our information leaflets and showed enthusiasm for the whole enterprise.
We're planning more awareness events in the future so keep an eye on this blog for future dates and watch out for us.
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