Call Centre Action Month Focusing on Mental Health Wellbeing in the North West

Hi guys! If you don’t know me, My name’s Erin and I’m the Young Worker Rep for the Mersey Branch and I also sit on the National Young Worker Committee representing that Telecoms and Financial Services section from the North West. In the North West we also have a regional young worker committee which is made up of both telecoms and financial services as well as the postal service and we as a region have meetings every quarter. Now as you may appreciate young workers now make up a lot of the workforce in both sectors, and we don’t like just holding meetings for meetings sake. So we’ve started doing events around our meetings! This gives us the opportunity to see young workers such as yourselves! 

This quarter’s meeting we based around an event in the BT Warrington Call Centre for Call Centre Action Month. We focussed the event on trying to improve the mental health of the people in the call centre as some may know it’s been price increase in BT which can be mentally drained and stressful.  During the event, we had multiple therapy animals in the call centre which act as a stress buffer and are proven to help de-stress and relax people and we had a really really good response, we had a lot of people coming in and leaving with smiles on their faces after the event just getting to play with the animals. We had a variety of them available to cater to everyone from a dog to a bird, from a lizard to a meerkat. We also had a lovely respresentative from Papyrus there to help provide information for any outreach projects that people may feel the need to contact and to promote self care within the call centre as well making sure you take time for yourself in your day to day life.

Not only did the members have a mixture of animals to play with and people there for support, they also left with a self care package which included things like a pair of bed socks, a hot chocolate, stress ball, tea light etc just to send the member away with a little reminder to take care of themselves before anyone else! The event was really successful and I plan to run another in the near future to follow up to make sure they know that THIS UNION, THE CWU CARE ABOUT THEIR MEMBERS AND THEIR MEMBERS WELLBEING!