Mental Health
Normalising discussions about mental health
Our aim is to provide people with the professional support they need to have a balanced, enjoyable and healthy relationship with work.
Intention
Spill provides therapy sessions, manager mental health training, and regular feelings check-ins — embedded into our Slack setup. Our aim is to provide people with the professional support they need to have a balanced, enjoyable and healthy relationship with work.
People can ask questions on Slack and get a response from a trained therapist within 24 hours. They can also book in a virtual therapy session if they feel they need a bit of extra support on a particular topic or in general.
Ahead of 1-2-1s, people can also answer questions about how they’re feeling which gets passed through to their manager. This year we have extended this to our weekly team sessions - so everyone can see how we’re all feeling. Whilst it’s always up to individuals how much they share, it can be a helpful indicator of any problems or difficulties that might otherwise get missed given we’re no longer in an office together.
Conversations that might have been triggered by a sad look or general demeanour when we were sat next to each other - will hopefully now happen because someone shares a particular perspective on Spill. Whilst a tool like this should never replace open and honest conversations, it can at least provide a small action for people to take to flag if they need a bit of extra support.
By creating more conversation around the emotions we all feel, the team is building their understanding of each other. Our aim is to normalise discussions around mental health and feelings in the same way that we have always talked about project delivery.

Results
With the introduction of the regular team feelings check ins, we’ve been able to see how everyone is getting on. These are then used to get everybody the right support that they need.
This could be a simple conversation to check in, a change in their workload or more professional therapy support.





What’s next?
We want to create more emotionally focussed catch ups - to help people better get the support that they need. We’re working on what they look like at the moment, but initial ideas include:
Alternating our weekly all team meeting between retrospectives and a broad ‘what’s going’ on session
Our daily sessions are focussed around a simple check in where we break into smaller groups and see how everyone is turning up to work today. The theory is that this could be particularly beneficial for people who were not at WJ pre-pandemic, and for people who are a little more introverted and don’t feel so comfortable to participate in a whole team call.
We adopt a more asynchronous approach to project health with updates fed through the team via regular updates on Slack or Trello boards
We’re also adding the Spill trend data to our monthly financial updates - demonstrating to everyone just how important these insights are to the running of William Joseph.