Digby Brown launch Supporting Your Wellbeing with help from SAMH

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have all had to adapt to a more simple way of life with fewer face-to-face connections with the world around us. 

At Digby Brown, we have had to adapt to a new way of working. Instead of working from our offices, we have had to set up work spaces in our homes. 

But what has that meant for our mental health? How has the loss of those regular face-to-face connections in the office affected our day to day lives? 

Even though we are still able to converse with our work colleagues by telephone or video calls, we want to be able to make sure that our people are as well as they can be. We know that the pandemic has been very difficult and that all of us will have been impacted by it in some way or another. The wellbeing of our people is important to allow us to work positively for our clients, even when faced with challenges. It is also important for our people to know there is help out there if needed and that they will be supported in their wellbeing.

This has led us to introduce a new initiative called “Supporting Your Wellbeing”. 

We have been working closely with SAMH, Scotland's mental health charity, to help shape the initiative. We wanted to create a philosophy around wellbeing that will seep into much of what we do as a firm. We will offer training to supervisors and encourage staff to speak openly about their wellbeing with colleagues. 

We are on a mission "to make a positive difference to people's mental health and wellbeing at Digby Brown". 

Last month, to mark mental health week, we ran daily initiatives, encouraging people to go outside and see how powerful nature can be to our mental health. We had some fantastic pictures during the week of how green spaces, flowers, woodland walks and fresh air can all be of benefit to mental health.

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The next stage of our work in this area is to facilitate training sessions for supervisors in the firm. These training sessions will be run by experienced SAMH trainers and sessions will include topics such as how to notice early warning signs of mental health, how to have appropriate conversations with people, and how mental health problems are identified in human interactions not just face-to-face, but via other means such as telephone or digitally, which is vital in today's ever-changing world of connections.

We have had very positive feedback about this initiative and we hope that this will help strengthen our foundation of support and openness at Digby Brown as we continue to launch initiatives throughout the year to support our wellbeing. 

We hope that by encouragement, enthusiasm and engagement with this initiative, it will be of real benefit to all our people going forward whether we are working from our homes or reconnecting face-to-face with each other again.