This week is the start to a new month, May, which also happens to be Mental Health Awareness Month.

This past year has been life-altering to say the least, for our agency and for our community of family, friends and clients. Along with balancing client work, our teammates have stepped up in ways we never expected – both professionally and personally – for one another.

With that, we know and understand the feeling of being burned out…

With company culture and employee well-being at the top of our priorities, we wanted to share a few things that the agency and senior leadership team are putting into practice starting in May. We challenged ourselves to think of easy, impactful and meaningful actions that we could take as a group to help everyone strike a better work-life balance.

• No meeting Friday: with jam-packed schedules at the top half of every week, to alleviate some of the TEAMS/Zoom-fatigue, to the best of our ability, we will not schedule meetings on Friday

• No emails after 7pm: there’s nothing more stressful than an email ping (!) at dinnertime, so unless it’s urgent, we’re saving that email until the next day

• Friday, May 21 is now H&S Mental Health Day: this is a company first and we’re extremely proud to announce that Friday, May 21 will be an agency-wide Mental Health Day. We are giving everyone at the agency the day off to rest and recharge. Whether it’s meeting up with a friend for lunch, going to the gym or even just sleeping in, whatever refills your cup, we support it.

We know these habits aren’t going to break overnight and it will require some “un-learning” on everyone’s part. Of course, being in our business, there’s always going to be some exceptions, but the hope is that we will all stick to these as much as possible so that we can all better our collective well-being.

In celebration of Mental Health Awareness Month, we hope you, too, have a plan in place to rest, recharge and refill your cup.