Communicating Our Values as a Business

In 2020, the Firefish Group became the first market research organisation to sign up to the Mindful Business Charter (MBC), a framework designed to remove unnecessary stress in the workplace and foster better practices for mental health and wellbeing. As a community of businesses, the Charter is founded on collaboration and shared learning and believes in creating meaningful change often through the smallest of steps.

Since joining, we have used the guidance of the MBC pillars to proactively communicate wellbeing principles within our business, including those that previously existed, but could get lost or go unnoticed in practice. The Charter also helped us develop practical principles in response to new ways of working during the pandemic and help tackle the potential stress this could cause.

For example, the heavy reliance on virtual meetings led to new principles around sharing communication preferences with others and encouraging people to turn off their cameras for a screen break. With a new Work from Home culture leading to a lack of natural breaks, we also developed principles around rest periods, encouraging people to signal their working hours and changing scheduled meetings to ensure people don’t have to compromise on a lunch break. Even with the increasing return to the office, these principles have continued to live on within the business, with the creation of more fully-rounded Working With Me documents, similar to this framework.

Most recently, we established a wider team of MBC representatives across different parts of the business, to account for different needs and to learn from one another. This has led to the launch of a new slide that we include in our proposals to client briefs, designed to communicate our commitment to MBC and our values across the company. The slide is an important step in our MBC journey, outlining our values around mental health and wellbeing and helping set expectations with our clients about what’s important to us and how we work. We have already received positive response to it from a range of clients and are heartened that more people across our client bases want the same for themselves.

We look forward to continuing to learn from other signatories, furthering the principles we already have, and developing new principles that can flex and evolve as we respond to challenges as they emerge. If this has struck a chord with you, then we encourage you to go and find out more about how your business could become a signatory of the Mindful Business Charter too.