Zoe Sinclair
Co-Founder
Zoe is one of the founders of This Can Happen. She is also the founder of Employees Matter, the largest provider of employee engagement seminars and webinars in the UK.
Sarah Henchoz
Partner
Many wellbeing strategies are strong in principle, yet in practicality, fail to live up to their promise. In the opening keynote of our conference, we learnt how to build a wellbeing strategy that delivers true impact and benefit to your workforce.
Jill Ford
HR Director, UK Publishing
Following our March spotlight on gambling and the mental health impact on addicts, we followed up to highlight how gambling can affect those closest to the individuals, including family and friends – and show how employers can work to support the mental wellbeing of these affected others.
Zoe Sinclair
Co-Founder
Zoe is one of the founders of This Can Happen. She is also the founder of Employees Matter, the largest provider of employee engagement seminars and webinars in the UK.
Julie Martin
Julie is a lived experience, affected-other who has worked in the gambling harm charity sector for three years. Her family was introduced to gambling harm after her 25-year marriage to a compulsive gambler sadly led to his death in a gambling-related suicide in November 2021. Her passion for bringing awareness and significantly reducing gambling harm has allowed her to walk on The Big Step and participate in many Parliamentary events, press and social media coverage.
Kishan Patel
FY1 Doctor/Charity Trustee
Dr Kishan Patel is a qualified medical doctor and a recent graduate of Imperial College London. He is one of the co-founders of Gambling Harm UK and formerly led the organisation as CEO for over 2 years without any financial or material benefit. Kishan is one of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Fellows and benefits from experiences in health-based research, health technology companies and financial services. He has also succeeded in growing and leading the student charity group Imperial College Friends of MSF and was awarded The Diana Award for his initiative to promote humanitarian prototyping and entrepreneurship. Kishan's altruistic drive to see gambling harm tackled as a public health issue stems from his childhood and ongoing lived experiences as an affected other due to a parent's gambling.
This session was an in conversation with Nat Nowak, Wellbeing Consultant at Cisco, looking at intergenerational mental wellbeing - and the different challenges facing individual age groups.
Sara Redwood
Partnerships Director
Sara owns the Partnerships at Peppy, the VC-funded startup that enables employers to support their employees through life's big transitions.
Natalia Nowak
Global Wellbeing Consultant, People and Communities
Part of the People and Communities (HR) team for the last 11 years, Natalia is responsible for delivering a global strategy that drives the conscious culture of holistic wellbeing for leaders, teams and individuals at Cisco.
Our first Awards showcase of the afternoon spotlighted our shortlist to show how one person can use their lived experience of mental health to create tangible and transformational change within their organisation.
Jessica Cherry
Senior Legal Editor, Practical Law
In a career spanning over 35 years, Jessica worked in television (notably for ABC's Good Morning America) and for a non-profit health promotion research organization (the American Health Foundation) before embarking on a legal career. After attending the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, she practiced at two global law firms (Baker McKenzie and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, where she was a partner). For the past several years, Jessica has worked for Thomson Reuters. Currently a Senior Legal Editor for Practical Law, Jessica writes about executive compensation, workplace culture, professional development, careers, and mental health and well-being.
Emily Warren
Director, Global Well-being Lead
Emily is Avanade's first Global Well-being Lead and is responsible for developing and implementing Avanade's Well-being strategy across 26 countries and 17k+ employees. She has over 20 years’ experience working with clients in the technology consulting sector to find innovative and practical solutions to complex challenges. Her personal experience with burnout led her to establish Avanade's first cohort of mental health allies and began her move into HR 5 years ago. A strong advocate for mental health and the importance of sharing stories, she has been recognized externally for her efforts. Her own journey has made her a thought leader and driving force behind Avanade's commitment to well-being, making it a strategic company priority, and a focus for all its employees worldwide.
Andy McAleese
MVP, Longevity, Europe
Andy is a member of Pacific Life Re’s Europe Leadership Team and has 30 years’ experience in the insurance and reinsurance industry. As a senior leader, Andy is passionate about breaking down mental health stigma and works across the industry to promote improving working practices and culture.
In this awareness-raising panel discussion, we explored the true impact of bullying upon mental health, showing how to recognise toxic bullying patterns at work, and how to tackle these effectively to support the mental wellbeing of your wider workforce.
Lee Chambers
Founder & Chief Psychologist
Lee Chambers is the founder and chief psychologist at Essentialise, an inclusive wellbeing agency based in Preston. After a diverse career, including time in corporate finance, elite sports, and building a video game business, he launched Essentialise to bring evidence-based, effective and inclusive wellbeing to organisations. He is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, has been inducted into the Black Cultural Archives, and won a Great British Entrepreneur Award in 2021. He is the author of the Millennials Guide to Wellness, speaks internationally on wellbeing and inclusion in the workplace, and has been interviewed widely across the media.
Jonathan Wilson
Campaigner and Ambassador
Jonathan has over 28 years’ experience working for the Metropolitan Police (United Kingdom) with much of that time in senior leadership roles. Jonathan’s police leadership required him to work with diverse communities, businesses, local authorities, across a number of government departments including the Home Office and Mayor of London’s office and internationally. He has considerable experience in prevention strategies, legislative changes, working with vulnerable groups, and partnership work.
Jonathan retired from the Police Service in 2020 after a traumatic experience of workplace bullying, a period of his life that impacted on him considerably. He now dedicates much of his time to education and challenging workplace bullying behaviours which he says is entirely preventable and creating positive workplace culture. Jonathan now talks widely across social media and to businesses in person about psychosocial safety at work.
Lisa Seagroatt
Founder
Lisa Seagroatt is the sole Founder of HR Fit for Purpose which is a multi award-winning HR consultancy specialising in helping businesses create healthy workplace cultures. Lisa used her own experience of a toxic workplace culture to create a successful business which celebrates its 6th anniversary during Mental Health Awareness Week in 2023. Lisa’s expertise is around helping business leaders and HR practitioners understand that people are your most valuable asset in any organisation and why a healthy workplace culture approach will ‘future proof’ any business and save costs by having staff who are engaged and motivated to continue working for the organisation.
In this session, we looked at understanding the importance of the role that line managers play in supporting employee mental health, focusing upon areas that might be of concern to managers, and also discussing where the boundaries lie in supporting the mental wellbeing of your employees.
Bruce Greenhalgh
Senior Wellbeing Specialist
Bruce is currently Senior Wellbeing Specialist at BT (British Telecom) the UK’s leading telecommunications provider. Previously he was head of Employee Assistance at Accenture. He has an MA in Counselling & Psychotherapy, is an accredited therapist with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and is a Fellow of the UK Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Bruce has developed and delivered programmes globally on wellbeing and mental health across all levels within and for multi-nationals including Accenture, BT, HSBC, Vodafone, Microsoft and O2. He has presented on related topics at conferences across Europe, in Asia and the USA. He has delivered to diverse audiences such as psychiatrists, corporate lawyers, wellbeing professionals and educators. More recently Bruce developed BT’s response to maintain employee wellbeing during the pandemic and wrote a wellbeing guide to help UK SME’s.
Gavin Sutton
Vice President of Learning and Development, EMEA
Grief is an emotion that impacts nearly all of us at some point during our working lives, yet do workplaces truly understand how to support grieving employees? This was the focus of this panel, where we focused on what businesses need to know when supporting employees experiencing grief, how to begin conversations and tackle stigma in this area, and previewing emerging themes from our grief-focused research study.
Kathryn Courtenay-Evans
Insight & Strategy Director
Kathryn oversees This Can Happen's new initiative - Research & Insights, which is helping companies to measure and benchmark the success of their mental health strategies.
Harley Cunningham
Planning and Integration Manager and Workplace Bereavement Consultant
Harley Cunningham has extensive sales and marketing experience in some of the world's leading companies, including IBM, Experian, and Virgin Media O2, spanning over 15 years. Throughout her career, she has been deeply committed to enhancing businesses' profitability by focusing on customer experience and churn reduction. Recently, she has ventured into change management and strategy, spurred by her current company's merger with Virgin Media O2, as well as a desire to expand her career horizons. Additionally, she has been pursuing a personal mission to improve employee well-being in the face of bereavement since the loss of her two-year-old twin son.
Heather Brooks
HR Consultant
Heather is an HR Consultant at NatWest Group who is part of the bank's bereavement group having lost her husband in 2013. She is passionate about supporting grieving colleagues in the workplace.
In our penultimate session of the day, we shared learnings on how to develop a mental wellbeing strategy that reaches everyone in your organisation, including notoriously difficult audiences to engage, all the way from head office to the front line.
Toni Graves
Global Head of Reward and Wellbeing
Toni is an experienced HR professional with 20+ years in professional services. She trained as an accountant at PwC, working with global clients across multiple sectors. After 10 years in client facing roles she moved into human resources and went on to shape and drive the firm's reward strategy. As part of the HR leadership team, she was also responsible for employee relations and global projects. She joined A&O in 2016 as Global Head of Reward and also became the firm's first Head of Wellbeing. Throughout her career Toni has worked with senior leaders to create people strategies that drive change and improve performance across many aspects of the people agenda including diversity, resourcing, performance management and wellbeing in the workplace - a topic she is passionate about.
Vikky Goodwin
Information Manager & Lead MHC
Vikky is an Lead Mental Health Champion for VolkerRail who last year won various awards for her workforce Initiative Building Relationships On Site (BROS). She has been a Mental Health Champion for 6 years and has spoken across various industry platforms about the ways companies can engage site workers in their mental health initiatives, and introduce better working relationships on site and in the office.
Natalie Chard
Wellbeing and Inclusion Manager
With a career in Finance and Education before joining SUEZ recycling and recovery UK in 2017, my first role was as Community Liaison Manager within the Communications Team. This role involved community engagement work, as well as the running of two education visitor centres in Cornwall. I changed roles in March 2022, joining our Employee Experience team as Wellbeing and Inclusion Manager. In my current role I over see our Wellness for All programme and develop strategies and campaigns that are inclusive and supports the wellbeing of our people.
Our closing Awards panel of the afternoon showed the connection between diversity, inclusion and mental wellbeing, and showed how building an inclusive workplace - for all employees - can bring huge mental wellbeing benefits to your whole staff population.
Nikki Adebiyi
Founder
Nikki is the Founder of Bounce Black. She launched the platform in 2020 as a culmination of her journey of recovery from anxiety and depression, seeking to help fill in the gaps she previously fell through. Nikki is also a published writer with articles featured in Freuds, the Journal of Mental Health, and Lancet Psychiatry. Among the many other hats Nikki wears are keynote speaker, mental health accessibility consultant, UN Women UK Delegate, 70/30 Campaign Ambassador and Creative Mentor Network Ambassador.
Sam Owo
Senior Inclusion & Diversity Manager / Race Action Plan Lead
Sam is the Group Race Action Plan Lead for Lloyds Banking Group, where she is responsible for the successful plan implementation, integral to the organisation’s Cultural, Inclusion and Diversity strategies.The first FTSE 100 company to make a commitment to increase representation of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic colleagues to reflect the society we serve, recognised in 2020 and 2022 as ‘Outstanding Employer’ category in the Investing in Ethnicity Awards. In partnership with the City Mental Health Alliance produced the ‘Mental Health and Race at Work’ report, which seeks to build the business community’s understanding of the challenges faced by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic employees at work, and how these impact their mental health.
6.45pm An in conversation with our Awards shortlist
Hannah Longman
Audit Remediation Programme Manager
For the last 6 years, Hannah has worked at Deutsche Bank, where she is currently an Audit Remediation Programme Manager. After being diagnosed as neurodivergent around the age of 30, she has driven the neurodiversity agenda at Deutsche Bank via their Employee Resource Groups. Notably, she delivered a global “Neurodiversity Month” campaign in October 2021, which drove awareness and acceptance of a range of neurodiversities. Hannah also shared her own story via Deutsche Bank’s internal network, with her article receiving 8,000 views! Since this campaign, Hannah has worked to strengthen understanding and acceptance of neurodiversity at Deutsche Bank, with a particular focus on label-agnostic inclusion.
Alison Corner
People Director
With over 20 years working in HR and People teams across private and not-for-profit sectors, Alison is passionate about creating great workplaces where people can thrive and deliver their best work. Her current role is Group Head of People at Enginuity, a charitable organisation whose purpose is to find new ways to close skills gaps in UK engineering and manufacturing. In 2023, Alison led the Enginuity team to win the Best Mental Wellbeing in the Workplace Strategy for an SME, demonstrating how Enginuity has embedded it’s wellbeing strategy across the organisation and used data to provide insight and drive continued progress.
