All’s well that ends well

If you can think of a bet­ter name for a reg­u­lar lunchtime per­son­al wel­fare dis­cus­sion than Well­ness Wednes­days, we want to hear it. 

Our first get-togeth­er to talk about well­ness was inspired by Men­tal Health Aware­ness Week. We had a great con­ver­sa­tion which inspired the blog we wrote for that, and then a few of us decid­ed that, frankly, every week ought to be Men­tal Health Aware­ness Week. We’re not a huge team, after all. We work hard. We try to deliv­er every day. If one of us is affect­ed by some­thing — men­tal­ly, phys­i­cal­ly, social­ly… even finan­cial­ly — then it affects us all. And the answer, pret­ty much every­where but espe­cial­ly at Clear Review, is to talk about it, get it out in the open and see what we can do to solve it. 

We’re also putting a big focus on hir­ing at the moment. Every­one knows those sto­ries of the com­pa­nies that lost their cul­ture as they grew, and we’re deter­mined to keep our DNA intact and car­ry on lis­ten­ing and learn­ing. And we took full advan­tage of the fact that half of the senior man­age­ment had a new busi­ness pitch to go to and so had to skip out halfway through, leav­ing us quite free to dis­cuss how bril­liant they were with­out the embar­rass­ment of mak­ing eye con­tact while we were doing it. Stu­art, Dan… if your ears were burn­ing, we can only hope it was in a good way. 

Natasha — leg­endary Head of Per­for­mance and Well­be­ing — gen­tly coerced us into each nom­i­nat­ing an area to watch to main­tain that del­i­cate well­ness bal­ance. I’ll list a few (anony­mous­ly) because I thought they were par­tic­u­lar­ly awe­some, but I’ll also spend one last line on a com­ment I rather liked on the sub­ject of what we do well already. 

We believe that we make some­thing that gen­uine­ly makes people’s lives bet­ter. That can feel like a big respon­si­bil­i­ty but it’s also real­ly frickin’ cool (look at this: I don’t think I ever worked on some­thing that made peo­ple applaud before). Every­one is invest­ed in this. We want to do the right thing in the right way. Every­one gets things wrong on occa­sion, but we work to fix them and we share feed­back and sup­port con­struc­tive­ly and kind­ly. There’s great stuff going on here, not the least of which is a deter­mi­na­tion to make sure that it goes on being great. 

Com­mit­ments to well­be­ing — the fruits of the first session 

Be open and don’t waste ener­gy try­ing to be strong all the time. 

Com­mu­ni­cate more and build up my lan­guage skills. 

Ask for more help and don’t try to do it all.