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Nov 23, 2020

Monday Blues? Not this year!

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By Drew Welton

Founder - I help companies hire innovation executives.

 
  It’s around this time of year we realise payday is too far away, most of us have given up on our New Year’s resolutions and feel guilty about it… and those of us who are doing dry-January are slowly learning they might need a glass of wine to survive the week ahead. Oh! And let’s not forget, it’s relentlessly cold and wet outside and we all just want to stay cosy underneath a blanket with the latest binge-worthy series on Netflix.

But fear not dear friends – for I am here to help you take your mental health and wellbeing journey to the next level! Allow me to introduce a start-up called OpenMind Wellbeing. Don’t click away – just hear me out. They’re quite different from your average mental health company – they’re creating an actual community that not only connects businesses with wellbeing practitioners BUT also takes care of all the admin, marketing and headache that comes with setting up a wellbeing initiative. They understand that it’s not always easy to see (or prove) the value of it, so they also provide easy access to insights to see what the impact actually is. They basically remove the pain points of starting a wellbeing programme.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ash Dey, one of the co-founders of OpenMind Wellbeing, who is the embodiment of a real-life Duracell Bunny – you feel super energised after meeting him! He was kind enough to provide me with some insights about what they’re all about, so here they are for you!

OpenMind supports workplaces with their wellbeing and mental health initiatives. They’ve opted to use the CARE model, which stands for Connect, Administer, Report and Evolve.

  • They connect workplaces with wellbeing providers – easy peasy.
  • All the admin is done for you, end-to-end, from payment to internal marketing material and a handy booking portal.
  • You get a monthly report of how many employees took a yoga, mindfulness or change management class, supplying you with clear data to help you understand what your employees want.
  • They evolve with you and your employees, so you can offer them exactly what they need.

In recent years, other businesses have also incorporated data and reporting into their standard packages like Unmind or Healthy Performance. A standard model often doesn’t involve the reporting and evolving side; they offer you classes x, y and z and that’s it. Whether your employees like it, use it or find it helpful – you likely won’t know.

Ash and Gabriela Macra, his co-founder, have both successfully set up wellbeing initiatives at their previous companies so they know the headache and extra workload that comes with it. So, they wanted to create a solution that would actually work; for the company, the practitioners and the employees. A platform that encompasses a catalogue, your admin, marketing, booking, finance and more. Fun fact - since both of them have been practising yoga, mindfulness and meditation for so long, their offering of practitioners is mainly built on personal relationships, taking community building to a whole new level. They take a very open, honest and human approach to everything they do. They’ve only launched their platform in April of last year but are already making massive waves in the industry. What they have planned for the future? Well, let’s just go with putting more focus on the health of ordinary people, also known as populational health.

To conclude, as always, here are a few tips on how you can take care of your mental health this year and fight those (Blue) Monday blues:

1.     Listen to your body, and I mean really listen. What is it telling you? What does it want? Check in with yourself, think about what’s important to you and make time for it – schedule it in like it’s your most important meeting of the day.

2.     Try everything! There isn’t a cookie cutter plan on how to take care of your health. Intrigued by meditation? Give it a go! Always been curious about mindfulness? Buy a book on Amazon or take a class.

3.     Find your people. And by that, I mean to find likeminded people that you connect with and start building your own little community. Feel free to invite Ash & myself as well.

Keen to find out more about their story & how they manage to seamlessly incorporate wellness and data? Be sure to join us on our Solutions for a Better Workplace event on the 11th of March where Ash will be leading a talk on their Open Mind-ed approach to Wellbeing! (more info coming soon – keep an eye out on my LinkedIn!)

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