Some of our employees, from across all Compass brands, recently attended the Mad World Health Summit which focuses on employee mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. Here is an overview of what it was and how we found it.

About the Mad World Health Summit

Employee mental health and well-being has much become an integral part of the workforce and is arguably as equally important as physical health. With this thought in mind, business leaders are in a unique position to drive systemic change. However, many are struggling to put in place strategies that will have a sustainable impact across their organisation.

The purpose of the Mad World Summit is to help provide support and guidance to employers on how to prepare to redefine workplace culture and adopt solutions to better support in the workplace and innovative strategies to address mental health and wellbeing.

The conference brought together a range of commercial leaders from C-suite to line managers and next-generation leadership teams, including SMEs to FTSE 100 companies. With the purpose of supporting organisations with the mental, physical, financial and social elements of a wellbeing strategy regardless of what process stage they are working on this. It also gave HR professionals the opportunity to collaboratively cross-sector and find ways to build on and bolster their commitment to employee mental health, wellbeing and workplace culture.

The Compass team who attended and their key takeaways

Members of the Compass team attended the event on behalf of the wider team and business here at Compass; including:

• Compass Executives Director of Corporate Services, People and Culture Practice – Abigail Bada
• Director of CCS – Adam Brenton
• CRS Head of HR – Cassie Pay
• Compass Associates Managing Consultant – Lynette Robb
• CRS HR Assistant – Maisie Platt

Compass Associates Managing Director, Lynette Robb gave her thoughts on how she found it:

“I took the approach from a potential client/business development perspective when attending the Mad World Health Summit.

The event was beneficial for broadening my market knowledge about the digital mental health sector space. I attended a lot of talks about staff wellbeing that had the key message of how organisations can improve their wellbeing strategies and providing examples of who is already doing this.

Another key takeaway was how investing in staff wellbeing isn’t just positive for company culture but financially beneficial too as a large proportion of staff sickness is due to mental health. This led onto the final reoccurring message of mental health in the workplace needs to be taken as seriously as physical health and the health & safety aspect of company HR.

It also highlighted that we need to ensure that employers understand how physical illness and injury can have just as much, if not more of a lasting effect on that person’s mental health.”

Abigail Bada, Compass Executives Director of Corporate Services, People and Culture Practice, summarised her key takeaways from this event:

The key outcome of the event for Abigail was the underlying message of how interwoven mental health and wellbeing is across the business.

“Mental health and wellbeing need to be a board / strategy company mandate as the issue falls into health and safety, ESG, reputation and it seemed most importantly risk, therefore needing to be high on a business’ risk register.

Employee wellbeing needs to be proactively supported with tangible policies and products that employees can call on in their time of need – wherever they may be on the curve of mental health problems. It is incredibly important that communications across a business and culture must be embedded with this message to help workers feel they have the ‘safety’ to call on whatever services are offered by their employees.

Mental health and wellbeing are only going to become a more critical part of employee culture especially with current economic issues such as the cost of living, family support, and overall changes post-pandemic.”

CRS Head of HR, Cassie Pay summarised with her overall summary from the summit:

“COVID has accelerated the employee wellbeing agenda for organisations who now recognise the direct correlation between wellbeing and business risk, whether that be risk to revenue and performance or risk to reputation.

Organisations should look to target their mental health and wellbeing strategies toward not only those who may be struggling or in crisis but also employees that are thriving to be able to position themselves as an employer of choice.”

Overview

While CRS currently has a big focus on mental health to ensure we can support employee wellbeing, the team found the summit incredibly useful in gaining an overview of how other industries are tackling workplace wellbeing and how we can always look to improve for the future.

Find out more about the Mad World Summit here. 

To find out more about our Community & Wellbeing initiatives and for all the latest CRS news, click here.