How Universal Sony Pictures is improving employee mental health

By now businesses should be hearing the message loud and clear: if you don’t take care of your employees, they won’t be your employees anymore. Putting employee mental health first has been a priority for Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment – and they’re seeing a positive impact not just on their performance, but the feeling towards the company as a whole.

When the pandemic hit, the local Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment arm knew it was critical to pay attention to their staff’s mental health, make sure they were in a safe physical environment to work from home, that they had the tools they needed to perform their jobs but also that they had the tools and spaces that could support their mental health.

Mental health and performance have always been a key to delivering great results for the business. Jim Batchelor, Managing Director at Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, leads a team of 70 staff across Australia and has seen the benefits of ensuring everyone feels part of a valued and open-minded team.

“Conversations around resilience, mental health, and how to stay connected were super important conversations to have for us,” says Jim, who witnessed his team adapt to a completely different rhythm of work. He attributes a lot of this to “staying open to conversations, regardless of how hard they are.”

Jim Batchelor, Managing Director at Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Image: Supplied.

“Conversation igniters” have been a game-changer

Jim subscribed his teams to Cuppa.tv, the Australian live and on-demand streaming platform with hundreds of experts delivering masterclasses, conversations and experiences all around improving work performance, wellbeing and belonging.

The feedback from Jim’s team has been overwhelmingly positive since tuning into Cuppa’s videos and live sessions.

“Cuppa inspired us to host a Gender Equity roundtable to discuss this topic, which was of interest here at NBCUniversal,” Jim tells Startup Daily.

Jim says that personally he is grateful that Cuppa has touched on some important issues like suicide prevention, gender and men’s mental health in such a thorough manner.

“These online sessions do the job of ‘conversation igniters’ at work – they ease us into these rocky topics and provide leadership a good set of tools to talk about them with the staff,” he explains.

Watch: “Cuppa is like Netflix but for businesses who want the most for their people”

“It’s like hiring an expert to come and talk every day”

Jim says that one of the biggest benefits of Cuppa is that there is something for everyone, especially because his staff are so varied in ages, genders and lifestyles. As part of their team, they have young people house sharing, young parents, single parents and everything in between.

“The variety of topics and experts is what makes Cuppa so valuable to us. It is like hiring an expert to come and talk about a topic every day,” says Jim.

Employees are free to pick and choose the topics according to their interest and how they’re feeling that day, whether they need a pep talk from a mindset coach or a diversity and inclusion masterclass. The guests are varied – Cuppa offers a library of hundreds of videos featuring Olympians, celebrities, professors and global thought leaders.

But a key attraction are the twice-weekly live sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays at 8.30am (AEST). These interactive sessions invite viewers to have a “cuppa” with a special guest each week, with recent guests including the founder of kikki.K, Kristina Karlsson, international wellbeing speaker Chelsea Pottenger and mindfulness-based stress reduction facilitator Chibs Okereke.

For Universal Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, it’s proven to be a useful tool to call upon to help improve staff performance and wellbeing. Mental health conversations are now embedded in the culture of the company, with some employees saying they’ve shared the Cuppa videos with their families too.

“In this day and age and with all the research that has come out, it is almost impossible to deny how important it is to prioritise mental health in the workplace,” says Jim. “If you want to retain employees and have the best performance, you need to listen to their needs. It’s a no brainer.”

Join Cuppa.tv for their ELEV-8 month (May) to elevate the performance of you and your team with eight key conversations and masterclasses. Head to cuppa.tv to find out more.

This article is brought to you by Startup Daily in partnership with Cuppa.tv.