Spotting poor mental health in colleagues or team members can be trickier if you are all working from home more often. As a guiding principle, look for any signs in behaviour change for that person: is their camera off on Zoom more than usual? Are they more monosyllabic? Has their work performance dropped notably? These can all be early signs that someone is struggling with their mental health.
A — approach: this means opening the conversation with compassion and care. Avoid the second person ('you') as this can make them feel under the spotlight; instead ask non-directive questions: how have things been feeling lately? What's home life like right now? This should all be done with clear boundaries, meaning making it clear from the start of the conversation how much time you can give them.
L — listening non-judgmentally: this means letting them talk without interruption, without trying to cheer them up, or fix them, or solve their problems.
G — give reassurance and information: this means pointing them towards some of the self-help resources on the 'There for You' hub. Finally, you can point them towards external resources, such as School of Life and Psychology Today, which cover many wellbeing topics in detail and are easily searchable.
E — encourage professional support: this means sitting down with them and pointing them towards available Quilter services such as Ask a Therapist through Spill, or towards Quilter's EAP.
E — encourage other support: this means encouraging them to reach out to other people in their life, friends or family, who can help them through this time; this can be as simple as asking 'who else can you talk to about this' and 'when did you last see or speak to [the person they mention they can talk to]'.
There are a few services that can provide further support on mental health issues over either phone or email.
Rethink Mental Illness provide a range of support, advice and information services relating to mental illness, as well as conducting national campaigns and research. Rethink runs over 200 mental health services and 150 support groups across England, including therapy, peer support groups and many more.
In addition to running Saneline, Sane also aims to improve the lives of anyone affected by mental illness through campaigning work, research and online support services.
Together is a national charity working alongside people with mental health issues. It provides a range of specialist support services, including peer support services, accommodation based support, criminal justice mental health services and advocacy.
We have joined forces with Spill, specialists in workplace mental health support, to offer you and your colleagues access to a wealth of new resources, including qualified therapists.
We are delighted to offer advisers access to Spill’s services. Please note that Spill is an independent organisation providing specialist workplace mental health support. Any views, opinions and guidance provided by Spill is wholly independent and the inclusion of any Spill-related content on this site should not be regarded as an endorsement by the Quilter group of such content.