C2C Case Study

Background:

The rail industry is high risk, high pressure and rail staff in stations, in the office and on the trains, can face many highly stressful situations including traumatic experiences. C2C already have an Employee Wellbeing Programme in place including a calendar of events and numerous wellbeing related benefits. To complement this it was identified that specialist training to raise awareness of mental health and wellbeing in the workplace was a missing vital component.

What we did:

After the initial consultation with Marc Sellis, the acting HRD, we agreed to start with 6 x 1-day training courses to reach the management population, with the aim to raise awareness, adapt mind-sets and develop skills. This was a practical session covering why mental health awareness and wellbeing is important in the workplace, how to spot triggers and symptoms of a lack of wellbeing, how to have conversations about mental health and crucially many practical tools and strategies that can be employed to manage our own and other’s mental health. The session was highly practical with participants practising techniques on the day.

We then ran a half-day facilitated session for the Executive Team of 10 to reflect on the outcome and feedback of the training sessions, and discuss and agree their next steps. The facilitator used a coaching approach to cover areas such as what are we aiming for, what are the challenges and how do we embed our strategy?

The outcome and feedback:

The training sessions were very well received with feedback scores between 8 and 10 out of 10 for the content and delivery style. The trainer was described as passionate about the subject, very professional, friendly and knowledgeable. The day was described as engaging and well balanced, useful and as providing skills to use in the workplace with one participant saying that “For me, as a line manager, who is responsible and dealing with people, this course was very useful and helpful. Thank you very much for this.”

Julie Brounos, L&D Manager, said, “The course delivered enabled our managers to take a step back and consider not only the importance of their teams’ mental health and well-being but also their own. In an industry that has a lot of pressures and challenges it's important to us that we can help support staff in identifying and understanding more about mental health and well-being. Since the course has been delivered we have seen a consideration being given for applying the tools and techniques attained through the training workshop and open up valuable discussions in our workplace for how we can continue to evolve in our support for staff. This was a good exercise and has certainly helped us to get off to strong start.”