Cut for time: extra answers from our accessmatters session with KDP Coaching & Consulting’s Katie Phillips

Our accessmatters session with KDP Coaching & Consulting’s Katie Phillips focused on how we can all prevent burnout and protect our mental wellbeing while working through stressful situations.

Watch the full accessmatters session with Katie Phillips here.

Sharing how her 15 years of experience in government, corporate and start-up communications led to her own burnout a few years ago, Katie detailed the signs to look for in colleagues, employees and ourselves when it comes to mental wellbeing and launching her own consultancy to tackle the issue.

We ran out of time to answer all of the questions that came in during the session, so Katie has very kindly answered additional questions on company culture and the approach of start-ups versus big corporate organisations when it comes to mental health…

How much does company culture matter? And what if the culture doesn’t lend itself to a caring approach but you as a manager are much more aware of it?

Company culture is super important. People need to feel safe, supported and able to speak up. If that isn’t the case, mental wellbeing will suffer and that will have a domino effect on productivity, creativity and relationships. If the culture isn’t caring, then that manager really needs to get some allies if they want to push the cause. Doing it alone will be draining. I wrote about how to do this recently.

Are there market sectors, in your experience, that are better at this stuff than others? Does a small start-up find it more difficult to have a concerted approach to this than, say, a big corporate with a HR department and big budgets?

It’s generally reported that the public sector does better in terms of supporting the mental health of employees than the private. The CIPD have done reports which go into more detail about what that looks like more specifically across industries.
Having a bigger budget is helpful but doesn’t always mean that it has the biggest impact. Smaller organisations that are willing to look at the core of how their business is run can do just as well with a relatively small budget. Many of my clients fall into this category and it’s their openness rather than money or internal structures that I feel have the biggest impact. It doesn’t need to be complex or expensive to be valuable!

Here are some useful resources for starting to tackle mental health at work for those with little to no budget…

– Burnout Prevention: How to support yourself and your team
– How to start a conversation about mental health
– How to improve your teams’ Mental Health (Clue: it’s not with Employee Wellbeing perks)

Read our overview of our accessmatters session with Katie Phillips here and watch the full video on the accessmatters website.