Mental Health Awareness Week at Work: Ideas for

Mental Health Awareness Week (MHAW) is an annual week in May and is part of Mental Health Awareness Month. We celebrate MHAW to appreciate and advocate mental health all over the UK. It’s obviously really important to make sure you mental health is balanced and in a good place.

It’s also just as important for a company to encourage and actively support well-being within the workplace. Even better if your organization can set a budget for it.

Mental Health Awareness Topics and Ideas

Don’t be intrusive

You might be more inclined to ask your team how they’re doing or if there’s anything you can help with more around the office this week. But, you should also bare in mind that, sometimes, people want to keep personal things personal.

If someone seems a little down or out of character, you can ask them once in private if they’re okay. If they say yes, you should probably leave them alone. If you pester people about their personal lives, they won’t thank you for it, and you could be making things worse for them by doing so.

Make sure everyone can join in

Getting everyone to play a game of football in the car park or getting everyone to cycle to work might seem like a good idea. But not everyone will enjoy that sort of thing and therefore won’t receive any benefit from your ‘well-being’ activity.

Get everyone Connected

Got various branches with huge teams? Maybe you have a small team who don’t catch up as much. Get everyone connected with dedicated time to chat about non-work related things to make sure your team not only bond but can battle this year’s theme of loneliness.

Get your team active

Like we said, your team might not all be able to undertake a FIIT session on their lunch break to celebrate MHAW. But, you should get creative and conjure up and activity that everyone can get involve in regardless of ability.

Mental Health Awareness Week Example Activities

We’ve set out a special itinerary of activities this week for our team members to address the this year’s theme of loneliness.

1. Step Challenge

This is a super easy way to get your team lightly competitive as well as active. Here at Amicus, we’ve set our team a week-long step challenge. The team member who’s walked the most steps by the end of the week will win a valuable prize bespoke to the winner’s interests.

2. Desk Yoga

Stretching it out is a fantastic practice to keep on top of your wellbeing. It’s recommended that you go for a little walk around the office to stretch every hour while you’re at work.

We’re going the extra mile this week by conducting a group stretch just before lunch guided by an instructor over Teams. This sort of thing can really get the blood flowing bringing more oxygen to your brain and could even make your day that little bit more productive.

3. Lunch Club

We love any excuse to eat some lovely grub here at Amicus. But we also enjoy sharing the experience together! As you might have seen from our social media, we’re constantly taking our team out for team nights out and dinners!

This week, we’re bringing that to the office and each of our branches have promised to sit down and enjoy their lunch together to chat and enjoy their meals. This will improve in-office relations as well as contribute towards battling tis year’s MHAW theme of loneliness.

4. Wellbeing Chats

We’ve gone the extra mile to connect our team this week and have sneakily dedicated a little 15 minute slot in their diary to chat with a randomly assigned colleague about non-work related things and issues to connect our team up even more.

So there you have it, 4 examples of how to celebrate Mental Health Awareness Week at Work. If you want to expand, support or build your team, you need to work on your culture as well as your additional benefits.

Find out more on expanding your team.