Branding for brands that share much more than your purpose

Ismael talks with the co-founders of Mentiness about how to take care of our team's mental health:

At Soluble we work with brands that challenge us. We also work with brands that make us grow. And sometimes we are joined by brands like Mentiness that share much more than a purpose with us.

Since we met Rebeca and Javier in the fall of last year, we’ve embarked on an inspiring journey that has allowed us to help them boost their brand and has made its mark on Soluble. Their project directly impacts the happiness of organizations and the people in them, so the collaboration between Soluble and Mentiness was bound to happen. This year we integrated their platform into our culture of wellness and our day-to-day work to care for the mental health of all the studio's professionals. To continue working on our 'making people happier at work'.

Getting tools to cope with stress, develop our emotional intelligence and provide our team with a prevention and support service. We do this because we know that mental health does not simply stay at the office doorstep. "Our mental health is affected by personal aspects but also work-related aspects, such as job satisfaction and motivation", Rebeca Calvo, clinical psychologist, and Javier Serrano, CEO of Mentiness, tell me. "Since we are not impervious to what’s going on in the world, if I have a personal problem my job performance will probably be affected and vice versa. If I'm in a job where I'm treated badly, my social life, my relationship, or even my self-concept will get worse".

According to the World Health Organization, 70% of mental health problems are related to depression and anxiety, "two problems with a strong prevention factor," they explain. This is a prevention that companies should not ignore in the workplace. The figures are clear: 18% of depressive disorders are caused by work-induced stress.

Why do you want to talk about mental health in the workplace? This is a question that Javier and Rebeca have been asked a lot. I recognize that I also am often asked why I talk about mental health in settings where the main objective is to talk about work. Today I’m not going to answer, I leave you with what Rebeca and Javier tell me: "Organizations are a good starting point to address the issue of mental health. Both the intervention part and the mental health promotion part; and the latter is important, as there’s a lot of stigma and it’s essential to talk about it". This is the reason why Mentiness was founded: to bring psychology to the fore and recognize it as an essential resource for the health of companies and individuals.

If there’s still anyone reading this with doubts about the importance of mental health in the workplace, I’ve got a question for you: how much does it cost a business to have an unhappy work culture? We could measure how much it impacts team motivation, absenteeism, productivity and talent retention.

"Imagine that your company needs a machine that costs 500,000 euros. Wouldn't you have it serviced regularly? Wouldn't you take care of it so that it works properly? It's the same with people. Putting them at the center means understanding that a company's profits depend directly on its team and that if that team is unhappy, it will underperform. It also means understanding that work should not be a threat to health. Taking care of people means having healthy work teams, which leads to healthy organizations”. Putting people at the center of the organization — genuinely caring about having happy teams — is a profitable business model in the long run.

I've recently talked about how it is essential that we create our own definition of happiness as a first step to achieving it. As companies and as professionals. I like the definition that Rebeca and Javier share with me: that the state of happiness we seek is, in essence, the feeling of being satisfied with what we do and who we are; a sum of personal and work-related factors that require a solid foundation without which we cannot continue to build: " Work must allow us to have a quality of life. That is to say, it should not jeopardize our physical or mental health".

Quality of life, but... how to achieve it at work? They give me more answers: "Motivation, finding a purpose in our tasks, feeling that we belong to a group, the possibility of growing within the company and developing our careers or having inspiring leaders... all of those increase our satisfaction". On a personal level, "managing our emotions and maintaining a balance — having a life outside of work — and tools to manage stress" are the factors that will help us.

Mentiness has given us a tool that provides us with metrics in real-time so that we can identify those areas where we have problems and where we can take action, so that we are aware of the indicators of the well-being of our people, obtain suggestions for improvement and be able to intervene when necessary. It’s a prevention tool that also puts us in contact with mental health professionals in individual sessions. This way we generate strategies to make our team happier with each passing day, and get closer to our purpose.