The Duke of Cambridge attended the Workplace Wellbeing Conference, hosted by Unilever to highlight the importance of mental wellbeing at work and introduce the new Heads Together workplace mental health initiative, created in partnership with Mind.
His Royal Highness took part in a roundtable discussion with senior business leaders, where Paul Farmer, the Chief Executive of Mind, discussed research commissioned by Mind at the end of 2017 identified that stigma is the main barrier to accessing mental health information in the workplace environment, and that only a third of respondents had successfully found the mental health resources online that they needed.
The Duke then highlighted the importance of senior leadership in ensuring the support and take up of mental health policies in the workplace, and the issues that still exist due to stigma and lack of access to the right resources.
Click here to read his full speech.
1 in 6 British workers are affected by mental health issues.
Last year we conducted research with the Data Science Institute at Imperial College, where we found that only 2% of people asked where speaking to HR at work, showing a big gap in conversations on mental health in the workplace.
The new workplace mental health initiative that we are developing with Mind includes a ‘Mental Health at Work’ website and online training that will aim to equip employees and managers with tools, training and a good understanding of mental wellbeing in order to create a healthy and supportive working environment.
This website will bring together curated online resources enabling employers to access workplace mental health and online training, including specific training for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs), for whom it is often more difficult to provide employee mental health support.
