In our Westwing Insights category we give you an exclusive behind the scenes look into our projects, events and our culture. Today, Sarah from the People & Culture team gives some insights about the Mental Health Week at Westwing:
“Our goal was simply to open the door to all things mental health and introduce the topic to the company and to our team. The interest and desire was already there so we wanted to start the open conversation. We wanted to provide some ‘first-aid’ to the topic of stress that we had been hearing about for many months, which is why we requested for our nilo.health experts to talk about stress management and resilience. We also wanted to introduce some basic, yet effective, tools, which led to us inviting Jodie Roberts (Kale & Cake) back to do a meditation and asking Christina to lead us in a yoga flow. Of course, longevity is something that we also wanted to focus on, instead of just focusing on today. This is why we went for the Zentor ‘Scientific Pursuit of Happiness’ keynote as well. It was important to us that our team members received information about living a happy life and how to implement their new-found stress management strategies every day.
We started the week on Monday with a yoga session, led by our very own Christina from Marketing. She guided us through a few flows and then we did some balancing exercises. This was such an important opportunity to connect our bodies to our minds and feel the positive effects of physical movement to our mental health. Our yoga session was offered both virtually and in-person. The session lasted one hour and over 80 employees participated. After the event, we also offered delicious fruit smoothies to-go for those who joined the session in person.
We continued our journey to mental wellness on Tuesday with a workshop on stress resilience, presented by Valentina Calandra, from our Mental Health partner, nilo.health. We are already cooperating with nilo.health to offer every employee 5 free coaching sessions every six months. We learned all about our body’s natural response to stress and some techniques on how to train your mind that stress does not always equal mortal danger.
On Wednesday, we enjoyed a one-hour long Keynote Speech from former Westwing employee, and founder of Zentor, Dr. Valentin Schellhaas. Within his presentation, he took us through his research on the Scientific Pursuit of Happiness. We learned all about misconceptions of happiness, things that are holding us back from living a fulfilling life, and some tricks on how to achieve more moments of happiness each day.
Thursday morning we happily greeted Jodie from Kale & Cake to lead us in a meditation. This session lasted 30 minutes and focused on breath work, allowing yourself to just be, celebrating everything that we have achieved, and accepting each other for who we are. This session took place onsite but also online “
Thank you very much Sarah for giving more insights and thank you to the Mental Health taskforce for organizing this event for #teamwestwing!