Mindfulness, meditation and inner balance – “mental health” is a topic that is becoming increasingly relevant, and not just in the private sphere. Especially since the pandemic and crisis situations around the world, it has become clear that mental well-being is anything but a purely private matter. Mental health can also have an immense influence on productivity as well as on the performance of employees in the workplace. That’s why our “Health Taskforce” consisting of employees from different areas decided to organize the very first “Mental Health Week”.

The goal of the Mental Health Week was to raise our collective awareness of mental health, to acquire new knowledge, tools and techniques and to apply them together. For one week, we offered various lectures, courses and exercises around the topic of mental health in partnership with the Techniker Krankenkasse as well as with our own experts. The Mental Health Week was held in a combination of lectures and exercises on site and remotely in order to give as many colleagues as possible the opportunity to make use of this across all locations. The courses offered were recorded on video so that the team can access the content at any time afterwards.

In addition to keynote speeches on the topics of resilience, positive psychology, appreciation and many other exciting topics, the Mental Health Week course schedule also included practical exercises such as a joint yoga session, autogenic training, progressive muscle relaxation and a joint cooking event.

If we’ve learned anything, it’s that mental health is on everyone’s mind - whether consciously or subconsciously. Focusing on this important topic for a week is a great start to promoting the mental well-being of our colleagues. We got a lot of interesting impulses, learned new techniques and implemented effective exercises together. We would like to deepen this knowledge in the near future and implement it at regular intervals as a whole team. In addition, we are pleased that we can offer further resilience courses for our team together with the Techniker Krankenkasse.