The pandemic has truly shaken up the concept of working cultures — businesses who have spent years trying to develop clear articulations of how their organisations’ culture operates (sometimes truthfully, sometimes more like painting an aspirational picture) are waking up to the realisation that when so much of their ‘culture’ was centered around the physicality of working behaviours, rather than mindsets and values.

Now remote and distributed work and hybrid teams mean that many of the values and statements in those organisation cultures have truly been tested and questioned. Has our working culture changed now we’re not in the same…

Did you sleep well?

Did you know there’s something you can do to help your mental health that’s so simple, you can do it in your sleep? Hint: it’s sleeping!

Unfortunately, for large numbers of people, sleep isn’t something that’s comes so naturally, especially at the moment, so in this resource, we look at the importance of sleep as part of our working wellbeing plan, and how we can make improvements to our sleep health.

If you’re not sleeping well, it could be a sign of something worrying you. If you’re not sleeping well, it could lead to more stress and anxiety. …

A few years ago, a number of startups offered their employees unlimited vacation time.

It rapidly caught on as a perk, became the thing to do if you were serious about employee engagement, and some larger non-startup firms tried it out too.

The truth is — it didn’t work.

On average, those employees with unlimited holiday took less time off than normal. The thinking is that scarcity creates value. If you only have 5 days, you’re going to make sure you use them all. If you have unlimited resources, it feels less ‘valuable’.

When you’re self-employed, we, in theory, have…

In lots of ways, the biggest challenge I’ve found during the pandemic has been the sheer relentlessness of things: get up, get dressed, make coffee, check emails, do work, do some meetings, do some more work, make some calls, eat, do some more work, another coffee, put the laptop away, eat, watch some telly, go to bed, start over the following day.

As a single parent, my duties also include homeschooling, so since the start of this year, that Groundhog Day has included: get my children ready for the day, lesson planning, lesson teaching, educational and emotional support, making food…

Making a priority of your mental health at work when self-employed is a task for every day, not just once a year or if you're feeling low.

Every year the same round of articles appear about Blue Monday — there’s those which remind us the original data was hokum, there’s those who give ways of battling the blues, and there’s those who seem to completely miss the concept completely and use it to sell us carpets or a new type of jam.

Not unlike any day which reminds of the importance of mental wellbeing, the idea of having a single day in the calendar where you remember to think about stress or emotional health is not the most effective approach — it’s akin to running once a…

Nobody likes turning down work — especially at the moment with things feeling even more uncertain, yet after a run of working on projects we might not feel are entirely suited to the sort of work we ‘want to be doing’, it’s quite natural to feel downhearted or frustrated that you’re not doing the best work of your career, or just taking projects because they pay the bills.

However, all of the work we do quite often has multiple forms of value — and trying to identify what type of value each project we work on, can help you shift…

I’ve been very much feeling the effects of the ongoing ‘lingering lockdown’ over the past months — I don’t have anything especially bad happening in my life, I’m healthy, I’m working, I have good people around me, yet I’m exhausted.

The smallest of tasks can wipe me out, dealing with challenging conversations or complex projects at work is just almost too much at times, and being a single parent and self-employed, there are things which I _have_ to do: grocery shopping, laundry, school-run, homework, cooking, paying taxes, finding work, chasing invoices. …

It won’t have escaped you that mental health at work has become an increasingly important topic in recent years — with employers doing much more to look after their employees’ emotional wellbeing. Indeed, it is much needed — over 70% of sick days off are caused by work-related stress.

But now you’re working for yourself, now you’ve got more control over your working day, the work you do and the way you work — is mental health at work still relevant, or is it just something big corporates do to offset treating their people badly?

Here are five reasons why…