DAMIA’s Mental Health & Wellness Program

Being the ‘best you’ you can be

In the current times of working from home and social distancing, we’re facing new challenges which effect our body and mind as well as the way that we perform at work and with our teams!

With the new lockdown in 🇵🇹 the tiredness and fatigue was visible in all of us 😌 The #pandemic has had a significant impact on all of our mental and physical health!

As a H2H (Human 2 Human) company we wanted to do something to help to improve our employees mental and physical health, providing the right tools and motivation to keep them strong!

We created a Mental Health & Wellness Month (MWM)
Throughout the entire month we scheduled up to an hour per week dedicated entirely to activities that will improve our mental or physical health!

WE:

1. Shared weekly healthy recipes
2. Shared positive affirmations
3. Had a Zoom Yoga class
4. Organized a Psychologist talk
5. Invited a Nutritionist for a Q&A with a quick recipe workshop
6. Created some internal benefits for people to switch-off from work

This soon became an internal permanent program at Damia

We don’t want to be a company where our employees feel like they need to hide their emotions. Damia’s culture tries to encourage people to be their true selves at work and that means sharing the highs and supporting people during the lows.

While #mentalhealth is not as easily measured as blood pressure or cholesterol, it deserves the equal amount of attention especially when you work with people. Damia’s Wellness Program focuses on helping our employees improve their health by creating opportunities and sharing knowledge and medical attention.

Companies with mental health benefits are at a significant advantage of those who don’t, as they are more likely to have lower instances of job burnout, especially in this current pandemic. Working remotely has a lot of advantages, however, there are moments that can be difficult.

2020 took us by surprise, the year that challenged us to grow, build confidence and strength, learn, improve our internal processes, but also got us looking at our organizational culture and whether there were cultural drivers that were influencing people’s resiliency and their ability to be emotionally well at work.

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1. Weekly healthy recipes that are easy and convenient to prepare.

By sharing this we strive to help our people to achieve work-life balance, and part of that is finding time to cook meals for yourself and your family. We always make sure they are delicious as well.

2. Positive affirmations.

Showing appreciation for employees consistently improves their happiness. Employee engagement and recognition helps to keep your team happy with their jobs and, overall, improves their quality of life

3. Yoga class.

Adding a yoga class to the office routine supports our employees’ wellbeing and increases team spirit. Yoga has the potential to increase teams productivity, simply because healthy employees make a healthy company! It was challenging but so much fun!

4. Psychologist talk

A specialist psychologist is able to create evidence-based programs and practices to help the company and workers thrive. She provides expert advice to better adapt and prepare for the “new normal” that Covid19 brought us.

5. Nutritionist Q&A & healthy snack workshop

While no foods or dietary supplements can prevent or cure the COVID-19 infection, healthy diets are important for supporting immune systems and can also reduce anxiety, stress and amongst others.

We had the pleasure of a nutritionist joining us to talk about nutrition, and to help answer some queries.

We also had the opportunity to make an easy, healthy snack recipe!

6. Internal benefits for people who can switch-off from work

At the base of our foundational principles of our business are health and wellness.

• We have a transparent culture, we hold a 1:1 with HR every quarter to make sure we listen to our employees concerns, doubts and help is offered, including managing energy, nutrition and mental health.
• We encourage proper breaks as an effective way to re-energize
• We provide healthy snacks in the office (during the 1st and 2nd lockdown we must confess that some unhealthy snacks were offered, but these were good for the soul — everything in life is a healthy balance).
• Employees are invited to take part in a variety of physical activities and are encouraged to participate.
• Special partnership programs with local gyms.
• We increased our health insurance, making sure it covers all aspects of Covid19.
• Psychological and emotional help is also on offer.

A global shift is taking place in employee wellness programs due to the pandemic. Taking the lead to create a strategy that promotes a true wellness culture is a must do for a healthy business.

Companies Wellness Actions Plans can be an easy and practical way of helping your employees to support their own mental health at work.

We must include communication elements that encourage clear and concise two-way dialogue, outline the desired outcomes, and reinforce key organizational messages.

As the world of work progresses, one of the signs of a top-notch employer is the quality of their workplace wellness program.

We can all benefit from some form of a wellness initiative at work, by ensuring that our people have access to mental health benefits including psychologist assistance in our insurance program, annual leave, work-life-balance, time to spend with their families and ensure that working until 9pm every day isn’t the norm.

We’re happy to discuss insights and ideas for these topics with you!

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About Damia Portugal:
We are an international innovative IT recruitment company with over 25 years of experience working across all levels, from support right up to executive board level, with our HQ based in the UK.

We came to Portugal with the promise to shake up the market and redefine how one engages with clients. Our core goal is to develop relationships across the market, offer a disruptive (but positive!) approach with both clients and candidates, always based on open and transparent communication.

We take the stresses out of recruitment and engage the right professionals who will excel in your organization.

We use out-of-the-box sourcing techniques.

We are innovative, disruptive, transparent, and relaxed.

We came to the market to do it differently and we love it!