We’re most of the way through Mental Health Awareness Month, and we’ve been offering tips, advice and our thoughts about the impact of mental health at work and on social media. We thought it was high time that we showed that we ‘practice what we preach’, so we are sharing the policies and working environment at Oh So Social that supports the mental health of our awesome team.
Working in social media day in, day out, we are aware of the impact social media can have on your mental wellbeing. The Oh So Social team know that it’s ok to switch off when they are not working – no checking emails out of hours or keeping an eye on their client accounts! In fact, we have a dedicated Out of Hours service for this, so client accounts are managed during evenings and weekends, and the office team can have a well-deserved break.
It’s no secret that it’s good to talk. We’re proud of our bond as a team, and Oh So Social director Katherine has an ‘open door’ policy so that we can talk to her about anything that’s bothering us, whether that’s work related or from our personal life. Plus, we have regular one-to-one meetings to talk through workload, training and development opportunities to ensure that each member of the team is happy at work.
Since the start of the pandemic, the majority of us have experienced remote working in some way, right? Although we were already set-up as business to make the switch to working remotely full-time quickly and efficiently, the Covid-19 lockdowns did have an impact on the team’s mental health. Working from home can be extremely isolating, especially if you live alone, so we made sure to embrace technology to bring the team together even when we were apart, with daily team video calls to not only go through the daily tasks, but to chat and provide the social aspect everyone was missing from working in the office.
At Oh So Social, we were a strong believer in flexible working long before the Covid-19 lockdowns made it a necessity for many businesses. Flexible working isn’t just for parents who need to work around the school run, but it’s for everyone who wants to achieve a strong work-life balance – whether they have caring responsibilities, a family, a medical reason or just want to jump on their paddleboard on a sunny afternoon.
At Oh So Social all of our roles are flexible; we have the option to work in the office, remotely, or a mixture of both. The majority of the team choose the latter, which gives us the social aspect of working with the team, with the flexibility to work from home and support our own families and other commitments.
We have taken a stand against the quest for perfection online. We have seen the damage heavily filtered images can have on an individual’s mental health and self-esteem, so we have made a pledge to stop using edited, filtered or photoshopped images in our own content. Not only will this protect our team from the mental toll of working daily in social media, but it might hopefully encourage others to follow suit.