“Not acknowledging that millions are dealing with mental health conditions is costing an enormous amount both in terms of dollars and cents and, more importantly, people's lives."
Arianna Huffington
Mental Health at Work Mini-Conference, May 2018
"I personally would like to thank Mind Share Partners for all of your support of this ERG and community from the very beginning when we were unsure, driven, and quite a bit scared on launching something that would make us so vulnerable. You provided resources and insight that gave us direction, hope, and reminded us that what we were creating would matter to our peers. To which, you were right. I'm thankful for Mind Share Partners, what you stand for and all that you're creating in this new area of diversity, inclusion, and belonging."
"After the Mind Share Partners conference, we created our own Mental Health Fund, since our health insurance excludes it, and talked about it so our team knew we had their back and they'd be covered for emergency care for suicidal thoughts, etc.
It's a start. Stigma runs deep. It's good that [Mind Share Partners] is helping workplaces talk about it!"
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Does your employee wellbeing strategy focus on culture? Research shows it should>
Pandora &
Sirius XM
CASE STUDY:
Company-Wide Training
Pandora is a unique collection of engineers, musicians, designers, marketers, and world-class sellers with a common goal: to create a world inspired through listening. People—the listeners, the music makers, and our employees—are at the center of Pandora’s purpose and everything they do.
In 2019, Pandora merged with Sirius XM Holdings Inc. is the world’s largest audio entertainment company, and the premier programmer and platform for subscription- and advertising-supported audio products.
Summary
Industry: Music, technology
Size: 2,000+ employees
Headquarters: Oakland, CA
Time frame: May 2018, May 2019
Result highlights:
Employees:
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Felt more comfortable talking about mental health at work.
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Requested additional information about mental health resources.
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Expressed an interest in learning more through ongoing viewing of the workshops.
Pandora/SiriusXM:
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Sent a signal to employees that they prioritize mental health.
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Is planning to expand their approach to supporting mental health in 2020.
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The Situation
WHAT THE COMPANY WAS FACING
2018
Pandora Benefits Lead and Program Manager Julia McCarrel was exploring ways to better support mental health at work. She wanted something evidence-based but found it difficult to differentiate between the various options for support: What types of programs, benefits, or trainings are most helpful for employees? Who is qualified to speak on mental health?
Julia decided to begin by leveraging May Mental Health Awareness Month as a time to build awareness, and brought mental health vendors onsite for a mini mental health fair. She included a Mind Share Partners workshop as a research-based approach to reduce the stigma associated with mental health, so that employees would feel more able to access the different benefits and resources available to them. The Mind Share Partners workshop educated Pandora employees about the myths and realities of mental health and equipped them with actionable tools to create a culture of support for mental health that complements the benefits and resources that Pandora provides. (See below to learn more.)
“I wish more people knew how mental health could affect people mentally and physically, it’s more than just a bad day.”
- IT Support Specialist
2019
Julia reached out again to Mind Share Partners about another mental health workshop at Pandora for Mental Health Awareness Month. This year, she wanted a greater focus on actionable tools given new context at Pandora. Since the last workshop:
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Pandora packaged their mental health benefits into a collection of offerings, including, Joyable services for all employees and “Mental Health Mondays” that featured employee stories.
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Julia observed a slow shift in the culture around mental health at work: more employees were talking about it and there was a growing desire for openness and support for mental health at work.
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Pandora had also recently been acquired by Sirius XM, and thus, was undergoing a broader cultural shift as the two organizations merged
The Solution
WHAT WE PROVIDED
May 2018
The Surprising News about Mental Health (Lunch & Learn)
Mind Share Partners presented a 1-hour long Lunch & Learn at Pandora’s mental health fair. The content reflected many of the questions that Julia had when she was researching the topic herself:
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Prevalence and other statistics on workplace mental health
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Mental health as a spectrum
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Stigma and normalizing mental health at work
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Tools for creating a mentally healthy workplace
May 2019
Mental Health at Work (Lunch & Learn)
Mind Share Partners presented a 1-hour long Lunch & Learn. This time, the content focused on:
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Mental health prevalence and how it shows up at work
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A framework of when to get support for mental health
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Concrete ways to start a conversation about mental health
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Role-playing and problem-solving real-life case studies
The Impact
125 Pandora and SiriusXM employees in total attended the workshops, either in-person or virtually.
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Employees felt more comfortable talking about mental health and learned skills to create a mentally healthy workplace.
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One participant shared with Mind Share Partners’ facilitators their own experience managing mental health conditions at work and how validating it felt to attend a workshop specifically on this topic.
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Another employee felt comfortable to later share their mental health challenges to Julia in a conversation about mental health at Pandora.
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Pandora sent a signal to employees that they prioritize mental health, and employees expressed their interest in learning more.
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An employee pointed out the lack of mental health resources on Pandora’s internal resources page, prompting Julia’s team to update it.
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Julia reported widespread interest by employees, including many employees requesting the workshop recording to review on their own.
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Julia and her team are developing an ongoing strategy to support mental health.
“I think everyone needs to be educated on this topic and I personally struggle with communicating my needs and feeling like I have a manager that understands.”
- Workshop participant
