Irwin Mitchell LLP

Irwin Mitchell is challenging the high pressure culture of the law industry by reducing stigma of mental ill health in the workplace.

Law as an industry is known to be a stressful and high pressure environment, but that was not the culture we wanted to promote at Irwin Mitchell. We knew we needed to do something to support the psychological wellbeing of our colleagues in the first instance, but also to support their wellbeing as a whole. Our reasons for doing this were simple, we didn’t want our Group to be an unhealthy place to be. An unhealthy place is an unproductive place, an uncreative place and an unhappy place.

When we started our wellbeing initiative almost two years ago we realised the great range of benefits that we already offered to help support our colleagues’ life-work balance as well as positive wellbeing.

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What we found time and time again was our colleagues did not know what they were entitled to and what benefits they had available to them, and their family, at their fingertips

So what have we done to improve the psychological health of our colleagues?

Healthy Mind Advocates (HMA)

We first delved deeper into how and why Irwin Mitchell wasn’t scoring well with regards to wellbeing in our employee engagement survey, by speaking to colleagues. Feedback identified the lack of awareness and training and as a result we decided to act upon this by introducing our HMA scheme. We recruited volunteers to receive training through Mental Health First Aid England. We now have over 40 HMA’s throughout our Group and across our 14 locations UK wide. Our HMA’s have an understanding of common mental health issues, the knowledge and confidence to advocate for mental health awareness, the ability to spot signs of mental ill health and the skills to support positive wellbeing. We have displayed our HMA’s and their contact details on our Wellbeing Hub intranet page. We have posters in our office break out areas detailing who the HMA’s for each office are, and alongside this our HMA’s display that they are HMA’s via their email signature’s and also by wearing HMA identifying lanyards. We also ask our HMA’s to record details of the support and advice that they are providing on an anonymous basis. We took the decision to do this so that we can ensure that our HMA’s are providing the correct support, as well as helping us to possibly identify hot spots or where we may need to increase our number of HMA’s in a particular office or area. We meet monthly with our HMA’s as a Group. During our monthly catch up’s we update them on our Wellbeing programme as well as chatting through any ideas or concerns that they may have. We also take this opportunity to remind them of the importance of their own wellbeing.

Flexible & Agile Working

Another change we made early on in wellbeing programme was the promotion of flexible and agile working. Colleagues have shared their stories on how flexible working works for them and how it helps them to keep the life-work balance. We have also seen large part of our Group encourage flexible working to all of their teams. In areas of the Group that need encouragement to embrace flexible working more we continue to work with them by reviewing our flexible working policy and approach, as well as rolling our manager workshop specially designed to promote flexible working and the benefits that it can bring both to colleagues and our Group. Since 2018 we’ve seen a 20% increase in formal flexible working applications but we know that there is a far higher amount of colleagues who are working flexibly or remotely on a more informal basis.

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Colleagues have shared their stories on how flexible working works for them and how it helps them to keep the life-work balance

Mental Health Line Manager Training

We have also designed and created line manager training specifically focusing on managing mental health in our teams. We find this training extremely worthwhile as it allows us to have honest and interesting discussions with managers around mental health with some of our managers sharing their own experiences. We also find that at times the training can be an indication as to where more work needs to be done. This training has received some really positive feedback, in particular from our senior leadership team who are incredibly bought in to our wellbeing programme in its entirety. This has been key in the delivery of our wellbeing project as a whole.

Colleague Stories

As part of Mental Health Awareness Week 2018 we encouraged colleagues to share their stories of mental health conditions. We had six colleagues who agreed to share their stories and they focused on a range of different mental health conditions. These stories were well received by our Group. During Mental Health Awareness Week 2018 we also launched our Group wide Wellbeing Hub. The Hub is accessible via our intranet and is designed to be the home for all things Wellbeing. On our Hub we have details of our Group wide benefits, access to our employee assistance programme, support pages detailing how Irwin Mitchell can support their colleagues on a range issues, line manager tool kits, our wellbeing calendar detailing upcoming events as well as external helpful resources to name but a few. It has become the second most popular area of our intranet.

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The sharing of the stories has led to shift in culture at Irwin Mitchell. There is a more community feel that we will continue to build upon and develop.

On our Hub there are various different colleagues’ stories on various different topics such as mental health, cancer, menopause, adoption, being a carer and becoming parents to premature babies. Our colleague’s stories have come organically from our colleagues approaching us and asking to share their stories. We truly believe this is the best way for them to come about as you are able to obtain an insight into the needs and wants of your colleagues, which will be different for every organisation. The sharing of the stories has led to shift in culture at Irwin Mitchell. There is a more community feel that we will continue to build upon and develop. What’s more some of our colleague stories are also leading the way for policy change making Irwin Mitchell an even better place to be.

Stress

We identified that the run up to the end of the financial year is a difficult time for a large proportion of our colleagues. This year in order to support our colleagues at this time we have launched mindfulness training as well as providing resources to help colleagues who maybe feeling under pressure or stressed. The resources include an online stress test and training to combat stress, line manager tool kit as well as our Executive Board sharing anecdotes on what they do to relieve stress. Having our senior leaders talk openly about stress and coping techniques saw over a third of the colleagues engage; a huge impact.

Irwin Mitchell’s wellbeing programme is one that will continue to develop and improve month on month, year on year. We are proud of the changes we have seen in our approach to mental health conditions, our colleague’s life-work balance and our culture in what has been a relatively short space of time, but we will not rest on our laurels we will always strive to be even better.

One of the biggest questions in wellbeing at the moment is how do you create the support needed to develop a strategy or programme on mental health? Reports (from REBA’s Employee Wellbeing Research, 2019) demonstrate that a wellbeing or mental health approach which is supported by the Board or Executive team is more successful than one that isn’t. So how do you bring your leaders on board?