Mental Health Awareness Month: How We Create a Supportive Company Culture?
Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. When it comes to workplace culture, each person needs a healthy and positive work environment in which everyone knows what their role and responsibilities are. At the same time, they feel supported and know that they can always communicate their needs and get help when needed.
It has been more than a year since we live and work in these new and uncertain conditions that caused tremendous changes in both our private and professional lives. Many people find adjusting to the new workplace – a working corner at home – to be one of the biggest challenges.
No matter the difficulties, Singular continues to grow and progress as a company, and our team has welcomed 70+ new teammates. Our organizational structure and company culture enabled us an easy transition from office work to working from home. Additionally, by that time, we have already used online tools for most of our work activities and internal processes, thanks to which our work continued undisrupted by the external changes.
This year, our main challenge was to keep up the team spirit, motivation, and social interaction of our people in the midst of the new normal.
Well-being at the workplace: A value we nurture
At Singular, we give equal importance to looking after both the mental and physical health of our employees. We aim to provide a positive work environment supported by transparency, flexibility, empathy, and understanding towards our people and their needs, as well as providing the needed tools for achieving it, says Elena Inadeska – Avramovska, HR Manager at Singular Skopje
The consequences of the current situation, such as being in a constant state of worry, fear, and less communication, caused many people to feel stressed, anxious, disturbed, or isolated. Working from home means being alone in the same room for 8 hours every day. With this, the social interaction not only became full-time online but it reduced significantly.
However, we turned this challenge into an opportunity to bring the teams closer.
Maintaining social interaction while working from home
Psychology studies show that when we take good care of our health and well-being, it improves other aspects of our life – better life quality, increased motivation, dedication, productivity, and energy, to name a few.
To help them achieve this, we organize activities for having fun and interaction just like we did in the office. For example, we did various interactive internal competitions covering different themes. We also had a few virtual parties celebrating the birthday of our Skopje and Tbilisi offices. It was a great opportunity to welcome new teammates too.
As a company, we are doing our best to keep alive the team spirit and the sense of belonging in the team. It is crucial to make the social connection more present than ever.
Also, we took our care a step further and decided to motivate our employees to increase their physical activity, considering we move less since we started working from home. We organized online workouts three times per week with Nadica Jovanovik, a HIIT trainer at FitKit.
Exercising increases our energy and provides stress relief while minimizing anxiety, and negative feelings. Once we are free from these emotions, we can prevent stressful situations and instead work more efficiently.
How workplace communication affects our mental health
Singular nurtures transparent and open communication. With everything that happened last year, this now matters more than ever. Because of that, besides our virtual fun efforts, we took the initiative to bring together all Singular offices in one company-wide online call – One team, three offices – Skopje, Tbilisi, Sliema.
During this online meet-up, we celebrated company-wide successes and talked about our mutual challenges from last year. It was a great way to strengthen the sense of unity among our teams. Additionally, the management shared their vision and plans for this year, enabling each person to be informed and join the conversation.
But, our efforts to improve our employees’ mental health did not stop here. There is always room for improvement. For that matter, we organized an online meeting with Tiana Ivanovska, licensed psychologist, soft skills trainer, and founder of SelfPuzzle. Tiana talked about communication and its importance for private matters and how it affects our professional lives too.
It was interesting to have a psychologist put things into perspective. Tiana used real-life situations in the workplace to explain in-depth about proper communication.
She showed us how not properly communicating can negatively affect our mental health. We learned how to handle such situations in the future and to prevent miscommunication with our colleagues and clients. This way, we all contribute to creating and maintaining a healthy work environment for everyone.
Singular will continue to work from home, and our online activities will continue until it is safe to go back to the office. We are beyond grateful to each teammate for their constant dedication and efforts. Improving workplace well-being enables our people to be motivated, productive, and most importantly – content and happy at their workplace.
Having happy employees has always been of utmost importance at Singular. Our care and contribution to each team’s well-being take different shapes to adjust to current conditions, but it never stops being a priority.
