Time to Talk Day is an annual event encouraging everyone to talk openly about mental health to reduce stigma, fight loneliness and build supportive communities. Helen Wilson-Jolly is the Senior HR Manager at our partner, Teva UK. To mark Time to Talk Day, she shares with us how Teva UK has fostered a culture of being open about mental health and her role in supporting colleagues to be heard and seen.

Our culture at Teva UK is shaped by what our leaders say, do and enable. Our leaders create an open culture whereby talking about mental health and wellbeing is just part of everyday conversations. We’re encouraged to check in on one another regularly, get to know our teams so we can spot if we think anything isn’t right and meaningfully support each other. A couple of our values we all live by are around caring and making our families proud, which links to the culture we are trying to create, and our wellbeing is at the heart of that.

In HR we can design policies, provide tools and benefits to support in the workplace, and individuals can practise self‑care, but only leaders control the day‑to‑day conditions of work: workload, priorities, role clarity, flexibility and psychological safety. When leaders model healthy behaviours, resource wellbeing and make it safe to speak up, engagement, innovation and performance rise and risks like burnout, absence and turnover fall. That’s why leadership must own it, with HR as a strategic partner and employees as co‑creators.

It is vitally important that managers and employees have regular connections. These don’t need to be formal 121s, but time set aside to talk regularly and for managers to understand how their teams are feeling about workload, development and progressing with their goals. It’s also an opportunity to catch up on personal matters so that managers can look at ways to support with adjustments or simply remind team members of the different benefits they can access. Beyond the manager and employee relationships, we should be looking out for one another.

At Teva UK, we deeply understand the importance of supporting our colleagues to have safe spaces to talk and, on top of many other wellbeing activities we run internally, have set up many initiatives to encourage this, including:

• Mental Health First Aiders who have all been trained by external experts and are available to all our employees who want to speak to someone. Conversations are strictly confidential, but we know this initiative is being used across the organisation and people are seeking help.
• Training sessions with managers about holding conversations around mental health and reminding them about what support is available internally through our employee assistance programme.
• Quarterly wellbeing webinars delivered by external experts on topics such as adapting to change, taking charge of long-term health and communicating with impact.
• We also signpost to external help such as Andy’s man club and The Hub of Hope.