Navigating mental health resources with Access Bookings
Access Bookings is an award winning TV, film and media booking specialist. Like many businesses, it faced serious challenges resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic. As many TV and film productions came to a halt, they lost a lot of their projected workload and projects. Soon, they had to make many difficult decisions around furlough, restructures, and redundancies. Staff began to struggle when their working environment moved to being completely remote.
Times were getting tough for the whole organisation.
The team at Access Bookings already had several mental wellbeing initiatives in place, such as:
- Wellness Action Plans,
- a mental health workplace champion,
- fifty mental health first aid trained staff to ensure presence in all teams,
- a calendar of events supporting mental health throughout the year
But because of the pandemic, they needed to strip things back.
Kate Wood, Project and Engagement Manager for MHPP, was able to suggest some options. This led to Access Bookings signing the Mental Health at Work Commitment.
Kate also ran training sessions around conflict management and management styles. Everyone who wanted to could attend, with 6 different sessions available. Managers gained confidence in talking about mental health with their teams.
Access bookings have brought in 3 new policies:
- a mental health policy,
- menopause policy, and
- a domestic abuse policy
This has provided managers with guidance to help them look after their team as best as possible.
By taking things back to basics and implementing changes with consistency, the impact on HR has reduced.
Things have got much better across the whole company. They recently moved up from Silver to Gold in their Investors in People award. One big reason for this was how well they look after their staff’s wellbeing.
Rhia Oliver, HR and welfare advisor, said “consistency has been key”. She explained that it’s not about having a one-off event day to raise awareness around mental health. Instead it’s been about “embedding daily change in the culture”.