20
January
2020
|
10:07
Europe/London

We're creating a culture at BT where it’s OK to say when you’re not OK

Marc Allera, CEO of BT Group’s Consumer division

I've talked about wellbeing, mental health and the increasing importance of putting that at the heart of an organisation, and getting people comfortable talking about it, with many colleagues and friends.

I also talked about mental health – and the importance of getting comfortable talking about it – with presenter and broadcaster Fearne Cotton and our own BT Sport pundit Rio Ferdinand in a podcast we made for my BT colleagues. We're sharing it publicly today because we want to break the taboo of talking about mental health. We're making this a team where every one of my colleagues across our Consumer brands, BT, EE and Plusnet, can be open about how they're feeling beyond Blue Monday.

It’s really important to look after our mental health, just like we look after our physical health. But not everyone’s comfortable talking about mental health so, although we can be more open about it than we could in the past, we want to start a conversation.

And, colleague or customer, if we could just have just one person come out and talk to someone about their mental health and change their life, that alone can make a massive impact and lead to hundreds – maybe thousands – more conversations.

You can find our Making Mental Health Personal podcast below, and on the BT YouTube channel.