This is a guest post from Julie Mcintosh, Chief Culture Officer at Kura, the largest independent outsourcer in the UK.

Employee mental health is in the spotlight following two years of COVID-19 disruptions. Research has shown that 44% of work-related ill health is the result of stress, depression, and anxiety caused by work.

Contact centres can be especially stressful for employees, who are speaking to customers and helping to solve their problems on a daily basis. These environments can be intense and emotionally draining, and many advisors deal with customers experiencing distressing personal circumstances.

It’s clear that the mental well-being of our people needs to be a business priority in 2022. But if your contact centre has never had a well-being plan in place, it can be difficult to know where to start.

With this in mind, Julie McIntosh, Chief Culture Officer at Kura, shares their top tips on supporting the mental health of employees in your contact centre.

Hold regular check-ins with your employees

Sometimes, it can be hard to spot a struggling employee – this is especially true if you have a remote or hybrid workforce, which many businesses now do. Your people may not feel confident enough to approach you, especially about personal matters, so it’s important to check in with them regularly to see how they’re doing.

At KURA, we hold weekly catch-ups with our team members to check on their well-being. Our employees report finding this really helpful because they can work with their manager to address their well-being without having to be the one to bring it up.

You could implement regular check-ins in a number of ways to make it a no-pressure situation for your people. Video-calling your remote employees will help to make the experience more personable. For office-based employees or remote workers who live nearby, arranging to meet at a café outside of the office can provide a more relaxing setting. Speak to your people to find out which environment they’ll feel most comfortable in (following whatever Covid guidelines are in place, of course).

Host well-being sessions

It’s important to check in personally with your people on a regular basis. But now more than ever, we need each other to get through hard times. At Kura, we started hosting live meditation classes via Zoom during the first 2020 lockdown, and it’s something we’ve continued as we’ve gone through periods of home and office working.

In these sessions, we practice meditation and breathing techniques – focusing on the breath is one of the most powerful ways to pause during our busy lives, and it can dramatically reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. Bringing people together to do these kinds of exercises can help your team to bond and make one another feel more comfortable. Strong camaraderie among your team is important because it makes them feel less alone.

Invest in an employee assistance programme

It’s important to foster an open environment where your people feel comfortable confiding in you if they’re struggling with their mental health. But investing in an employee assistance programme will also give them access to expert advice, support services, and counselling. Having access to professional counselling is important at a time when NHS mental health services are stretched thinly and waiting lists are long.

KURA has partnered with Pam Assist, which offers a huge range of well-being and mental health support to our employees. Our people can speak to mental health professionals confidentially, giving them the confidence to communicate openly and honestly with a trained expert. As well as telephone support services, our employees have access to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and eye movement and desensitisation reprocessing therapy (EMDR) for a range of mental health conditions without having to wait for a referral from their GP or doctor.

Give your employees some flexibility

Talking to customers on the phone all day, especially if it’s on serious topics, can be mentally and emotionally draining. Allowing your advisors to rotate between your different customer service channels can help them to relax and recalibrate.

Have a discussion with your advisors to find out how best to implement this. You might find that an even split, with phone calls in the morning and live chat in the afternoon, is most suitable, or you could allow your employees shorter periods of working through emails or chats throughout the day to give them a break from the exhaustion of back-to-back phone calls.

This is a guest post from Julie Mcintosh, Chief Culture Officer at Kura, the largest independent outsourcer in the UK.

About Julie & Kura

Julie Mcintosh is the Chief Culture Officer at Kura, the largest independent outsourcer in the UK that specialises in providing tailored customer support solutions to businesses across a range of sectors including insurance, finance, telecoms, retail, charity, utilities, and the public sector. Kura makes an unrivalled investment in its people, and its engaged, passionate team is what set its offer apart. Inisoft is Kura’s in-house contact centre software, which has been developed in partnership with Kura employees, making it easy for customer support teams to use so that Kura’s people can focus solely on the customer at the other end of the line.

Kura has offices in Glasgow, Liverpool, Sunderland, Forres, and Durban in South Africa, and has a multitude of clients across 16 countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, and the United States of America.

Find out more at https://www.wearekura.com/ and check out their workplace well-being initiatives here: https://www.wearekura.com/kura-cares/

Thanks to Wokandapix on Pixabay for the image.