In conversation with James Elwood

The conversation around men’s mental health has been growing in urgency in recent years, and this is something that James Elwood is extremely passionate about. Alongside his work ensuring quality service delivery for our Managed IT Services customers, James has been working hard to help his colleagues to achieve greater wellbeing. We spoke to him to learn more about his journey to lead the OneAdvanced Men’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Network and provide knowledge and support for his colleagues.

What inspired you to set up the OneAdvanced Men’s Mental Health & Wellbeing Network?

Prior to joining OneAdvanced, I worked for a number of large MSPs where I was responsible for managing and leading large teams of people, predominantly within the engineering sector, which at the time was a very male-driven environment. Through those years, I knew several team members who suffered severe mental health crises and we did our best to get them support. It became quite apparent that there wasn't the level of support out there provided for men.

Off the back of that, I decided I wanted to set up a network predominantly around men's mental health. I bought the idea to OneAdvanced. We spoke about it, and we decided to set up the Diversity and Inclusion Network with a dedicated stream for Men's Mental Health and Wellbeing to complement our existing networks.

We’ve got a large diversity and inclusion community within OneAdvanced, and everybody is very supportive. We do cross pollination between the networks, so we've certainly worked with other DE&I networks within the organisation, and we've had guest speakers from the other networks come and join us.

How do you encourage your OneAdvanced colleagues to participate in the network?

A lot of it comes from word of mouth. I've been really lucky that I've been able to talk to the leaders of the business about men's mental health. That has enabled me to go and attend multiple team meetings and events in the business and connect with more colleagues.

We run our monthly sessions as well where people come along, so that's advertised on the Hub. We generally pick a topical subject each month and we have a bit of a debate and a conversation about it. But we also encourage people to come and talk to us directly as well outside of the network meeting. So, if they need support or advice, we're here to be able to provide that and signpost them to the Wellness support that’s available.

It’s really important for us that we carry on growing our network. By word of mouth, getting involved, getting out there, coming and talking to teams.

We've got a number of initiatives we're also working on at the moment that we're hoping to launch later this year. One of them is doing face to face network meetings in offices. So doing a tour around the OneAdvanced offices and giving people an opportunity to come and have a chat with us rather than over Teams, which is how it's done at the moment.

What would you say to someone that is struggling, what advice would you give?

My first piece of advice would be don't be afraid to talk about it. Stereotypically, men do not want to talk about their own mental health.

So find somebody you're comfortable with, that you feel you can have that conversation with and tell them what's on your mind. And if you're not comfortable having a conversation with somebody, you know, look at our employee assistance program. They are a completely neutral entity that you can go and talk to, there's no feedback loop back into our business or anything, you can have a confidential conversation with them.

Growing out of the Network, James took the brave step to set up a new charity. This was an important move to support more men to access vital mental health support services. We asked James more about the process and how his work is continuing beyond OneAdvanced.

Tell us more about the charity that you set up.

The charity is called On The MENd and its focus is predominantly around supporting men through mental health challenges. We are not exclusive, so anybody can come and join our sessions, come and talk to the charity and get advice and signposting.

As a charity, we do many fundraising events each year, both for our own charity and for other mental health charities. So, the most recent one was a night walk through London that we did supporting Mental Health UK as a charity. We've also got an upcoming one in a couple of months where we're doing a rough sleeping challenge in Kent overnight. So, that's the next one that's on the books.

We’d like to thank James Elwood for sharing his insights with us, and for his amazing work supporting such an important cause. You can learn more about OneAdvanced’s commitment to charity work in our recent blog about our partnership with the Prince’s Trust. You can also learn more about On The MENd, and how you can support their work here. ?