How Headspace Builds a Healthy Mental Wellness Culture

Between the pandemic and the current cost of living crisis, there are a lot of uncertainties to consider in day-to-day life.But beyond the dramatic and worrying events happening out in the world, we all have our own individual struggles too. With that in mind, how can businesses ensure that they’re supporting their workforce instead of adding to their stresses?

Headspace is a platform that’s whole purpose is to support people’s mental health through its content and community - but it’s also a business that practices what it preaches. As well as providing employees with a host of benefits such as a stipend to help pay for therapy and exercise, unlimited holidays, ‘mind days’ and a host of internal learning and personal development programmes, it also has cultivated a supportive culture.

Louise Troen, vice president of global content and studios marketing, joined Headspace in March 2021, and since then she’s seen first-hand just how the platform walks the walk.

“Our mission as a brand is to improve the health and happiness of the world. And we absolutely have to start that internally,” says Louise, who shares what she's learned about building healthy cultures.

One of the revelations for Louise, when she moved to Headspace, was the importance of psychological safety. It’s not enough to tell people to ‘bring their whole selves to work’ if they don’t feel safe, to do so or if the culture encourages employees to undermine each other.

“When I joined [Headspace], the language of psychological safety was communicated a lot in the company. It's something that I hadn't really thought through in my previous roles and I always believed, and felt passionately about encouraging teammates to feel like they could be open and vulnerable,” she says. “There wasn't the threat of hierarchy, but there was the support of accountability and that culture internally was defined by leadership - but it was really built from the ground up. 

“I think psychological safety is where it starts: do you and are you constructing a culture internally where employees feel safe enough to come to you with their problems? And I think that also is representative in life in general, we will have challenges, we all are going to struggle in our relationships, our personal life, our working environments, if we have the confidence and the space to explain that, then it allows for the freedom for support and people to work with you to fix it. And that's also why community is so important,” says Louise

On a practical level, explains Louise, it means that leadership teams need to do more than issue nice words  - they need to put into place mechanisms to ensure any policies are accessible and actionably. She points to holiday leave - it’s not enough for a company to simply encourage people to take their holidays, they need to proactively ensure that people feel they can. Fearful and ultra-competitive business cultures, for example, can make people feel vulnerable.

 

“You empower and you inspire from the top. But then you create access points and platforms for junior staff to rise up,” says Louise.

Ultimately, you can have all the perks and benefits in the world, but without a culture that sees both leadership on the matter from the top and the psychological safety and active engagement for those who are more junior, it’s unlikely you’ll foster that positive environment. That’s something Louise has learned in her time at Headspace, as she’s seen how the company very intentionally fosters that culture.

 “I think the real turning point for me was that this isn't just about processes and benefits. But this is about inspiring a culture of change both from the top down and from the bottom up. And then what happens is somewhere in the middle, you meet this incredibly inspiring place, which often results in better work, higher employee retention, better employees overall – because people are coming in for the right reasons – better team collaboration, and generally happier and healthier employees.”

One way to foster that culture is to ensure that there’s an internal network that’s able to easily react when members of the team are having a difficult time. 

“There are always going to be business metrics and expectations of your role, and that's where we have to be really careful with making sure that there is always a support network. If someone needs to take a mental health day. If someone says - and I say this to my team, often - ‘I'm not feeling my strongest today, I need some support on this call’ or ‘today is not the right day for us to present back because I didn't sleep great and it's okay’. It's about setting an environment where it's okay to not feel ok.”

That means building flexibility into your culture and operations. It means enabling parents to work around the school run, or empowering people to work remotely .

Science underpins Headspace’s approach to their product and programmes - and that also counts when it comes to internal resources and training schemes.

“When you're talking about people's mental health, it has to be science-based.There's a level of accessibility that comes with things like Sleepcast, and Stories and narratives that people feel like they can relate to, but embedded and affected, all of that is testing. And we have to test if this is effective before we promise our community and our members that it will benefit them long-term, and you'll see a lot more content coming out from us in the next six months that is even more clinically backed. So, at the moment, we're science-backed, and we're working with clinicians and various different healthcare providers to create content that essentially is programmed to have an even longer lasting effect. 

Compassionate leadership is something that Headspace endeavours to cultivate internally and they’ve also recently rolled out a course in this for their B2B clients too.

And again, that’s something that involves proactive support, as it’s easy to forget that being compassionate and supportive can also be emotionally taxing in its own way. “Remembering that it's our senior leadership that really carries most of the accountability when it comes to project successes or team happiness,” says Louise. “I definitely think that is a burden that many of us carry, because we care so deeply.”

Compassionate leaders can empower teams and be instrumental in modelling behaviours that benefit the wider company culture. “I think part of that is also remembering that we are in service of the team,” says Louise. “I am not driving the team, I'm no better than the team, my job is to make them, ultimately, better than me. That would be me delivering a good job in my role. But I think we need to get more leaders to that point. But Headspace has a lot of them and my boss is exactly the same. She is wildly empowering and very trusting, and so I think that also feeds itself down to me, and then also to my team after that.”