Launching Unmind #2: How M&S planned for success

Throughout October 2020, M&S orchestrated a broad campaign to promote mental and financial wellbeing among their workforce. Part of this involved rolling out the Unmind platform to its 65,000 employees. Here’s how they used awareness days and internal events to inspired their teams to nurture their wellbeing. 

In the first post of this series we looked at how Virgin Media used a blend of internal and external communications to roll Unmind out to its geographically dispersed workforce. This post looks back to autumn 2020 when multinational retailer M&S upgraded their wellbeing strategy by launching both Unmind and financial wellbeing platform Salary finance in one month. 

Working with our Client Success and in-house Psychology teams, M&S were able to use awareness days and a range of internal events to maximise exposure and educate their people as to the importance of proactively nurturing their mental wellbeing. Here's what they did.

Planning for success

From digital transformation to empowering people to make a positive impact on wellbeing, communities and the planet, there’s more to M&S than being a leader of the British high street since 1884. The organisation holds itself to equally high standards in supporting employee mental health and wellness.

M&S brought great attention to detail to their launch plan, covering many bases and engaged thousands of its workforce.

Our highlights:

• Using the momentum of awareness days to engage people with the topic of mental health, and providing actionable support through Unmind.
• HR learning festival – a month-long series of activities aimed at empowering M&S’s HR teams during which Unmind’s Dr Kate Daley led a session on self-care for HR and the state of wellbeing in the workplace.
• Lunch & Learn webinars – M&S hosted two companywide Lunch & Learn webinars to kickstart the launch of Unmind and Salary Finance, educating people as to the value of each platform, and how to use them.
  
  

Platform engagement

Thanks to these various initiatives and the ongoing collaborative efforts between our Client Success team and the Wellbeing leaders at M&S, their employees have really taken to the platform.

• 97% of M&S employees rated our self-guide L&D programmes as 'good' or 'excellent'. 
• M&S staff have used our Tools for over 72,000 minutes combined.
• Popular tools include Movement & Yoga, and Calmness exercises.

An ongoing campaign for cultural change

Read the full case study to see how M&S, Entain, and Nationwide also launched Unmind to promote mental health among their workplaces.

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