Highlights, Culture // Lilli Ahner-Wetzel // Jan 26, 2024
For us at Tallence, our employees are our greatest asset. Without our team, we would not be able to achieve our major goals, develop new ideas or, to put it mildly, exist on the market.
Naturally, their well-being and health are therefore particularly important to us. If your health is not in balance, you won't have the energy to be motivated to drive innovation or "just" work through your daily to-dos. The most dramatic consequence is that affected employees are absent for long periods of time. This is not only a further burden for the respective employees and their families, but also for the direct team. Tasks are taken on and the workload increases, which in turn can quickly lead to health problems. It's a vicious circle.
But what can we do as an employer to provide our team with the best possible health support?
It goes without saying that we comply with all legal requirements that must be observed to ensure that all employees are well at work. For example, we have implemented our annual briefings, our risk assessments including measures, first aid at our sites, defibrillators, electrical equipment tests and much more.
However, these measures are the minimum standard we need to avoid direct physical harm.
We don't want to stop there. Over the past few years, we have therefore introduced more and more measures and benefits from which our team members can benefit.
In line with the motto "A healthy mind lives in a healthy body", we have been offering our employees the opportunity to put together a new bike to suit their own taste for many years through a bike leasing scheme subsidised by Tallence. This means that employees can decide for themselves whether they have to pay anything on top.
Since last year, we have also offered the option of using the EGYM Wellpass. This offers our employees throughout Germany and Austria a range of sports and wellness options as well as courses on health-related topics - and is of course subsidised for the whole team.
However, as physical fitness is not the only decisive factor for an "all-round feeling of well-being", our benefits portfolio also includes a number of other measures.
The working time account gives you the opportunity to take longer breaks or retire earlier. This allows you to fulfil small and big dreams without having to worry about losing your job.
To promote work-life balance, we created a mobile working policy shortly before the start of the 2020 pandemic so that our employees can work flexibly while travelling and better balance their private and professional lives.
To support our employees in mentally challenging situations, we have introduced an Employee Assistance Programme, or EAP for short. This EAP offers employees (and their direct relatives!) the opportunity to turn to it with almost any concern. It is not just about help with severe mental stress or mental illness, but also about support in difficult situations, such as bereavement, caring for relatives, childcare, separation, etc. In many life situations, people need external support, be it on an emotional or professional level. Our EAP partner therefore provides support from finding a specialist to initial counselling in the event of mental illness or serious situations, through to advice from lawyers in the event of legal problems.
We take the topic of well-being and health very seriously and already offer our employees many opportunities. But people and the world of work are constantly changing, which is why we always use our annual risk assessment to evaluate and further develop our offerings. Last November, for example, we sent out a survey to our team on the subject of mental stress in everyday life and at work. Fortunately, the evaluation showed us that we are already very well positioned in many areas.
What was nevertheless noticeable: the change in the world of work and working conditions (more mobile working, less personal contact with colleagues) coupled with private situations and observations of current world events are causing increased stress for several colleagues. Of course, there are also phases of increased time and performance pressure in every project from time to time.
We feel that these stress developments are very understandable and human and therefore wanted to offer our employees a further programme that consciously addresses the topic of mindfulness and stress reduction.
Through meditation and mindfulness training in everyday life, we want to start the new year together as a team and bring more mindfulness and focus on our mental health into our everyday lives. We are delighted to be able to work with our colleague Carina Wolters and her small business "Lemon Meditation", we are not only able to establish a "Mental Health Initiative" at Tallence, but also to support the personal passion of a colleague.
Carina supports the Tallence crew as Product Manager for Digital Experience. In addition to her professional work with us, she has turned her passion for meditation and mindfulness into her own meditation podcast. Every week, she publishes guided meditations on the Spotify and Apple Podcasts platforms, as well as mindfulness impulses on various topics on her Instagram account. She is a meditation teacher and offers live meditations on site and online through her company Lemon Meditation, which she now wants to use to reach the world of work.
Lemon Meditation stands for guided meditations and mental refreshment. For a mindfulness impulse that can be easily integrated into a modern lifestyle.
"Our modern (working) life is often super dynamic and eventful. I am convinced that we all need tools to integrate moments of rest, relaxation and reflection into our day," says Carina.
"Mental health is not divided into a private and a work-related area. In the consulting environment in particular, the workload is sometimes very high, many projects run in parallel and we are constantly thinking about the future. This makes it all the more important to be mindful of ourselves and our feelings - to consciously bring our thoughts back to the here and now again and again. Meditation sessions are a great tool for this, especially during the day. Even if everyone sits alone during a meditation session, meditating together brings us together. This benefits both personal well-being and teamwork."
Carina will now offer a weekly guided meditation for our employees in our Code Working Space in Hamburg. The meditations will be broadcast live via the intranet so that employees from other locations or working from home can also take part. Members of the Code Working Space also have the opportunity to take part. In addition, there is a weekly mindfulness impulse in the form of podcast episodes, newsletters, breathing exercises or impulse lectures.
The weekly meditations and mindfulness impulses offer us all a valuable opportunity to promote our mental health through space for calm and reflection and to give mindfulness a place in our professional lives too.
We look forward to more (mental) health in the new year!
