Giant Swarm mental health day recap

I am a big fan of mental health days. It started in my school days. There were days I asked my mom to stay home from school, just because, and she let me. Those days were full of reading books and watching TV. Alternatively, I would go to work with my mom and just roam the city. I use this tool to this day.

The Giant Swarm perspective is slightly different, but the basics hold true. Sometimes a person needs a change of pace and/or a change of scenery. It re-energizes and helps people show up as their best selves. These facts are fully recognized by the company. This provides spaces for people to be straightforward with their struggles, their needs and their strategies.

The story of the mental health day at Giant Swarm starts with SIG Culture. It is our culture related Special Interest Group. This SIG is a manifestation of the structure of Giant Swarm as a self organizing company. Everybody is on a team, but if there is something that you care about you can get involved in a special interest group. This is the group that put together our mental health day. Led by our content writer, Heather Clancy and with participation of people in everything from marketing to customer success and HR.

We had a mixture of internally led talks and activities and outside vendors on our agenda. We accounted for the needs of introverts and extroverts on our team. Ultimately, we provided a combination of cerebral and physical activities. These activities ran the gamut of spiritual to concrete.

We kicked off with three plenary sessions, which were attended by about half of our employees. We then broke out into a few streams to provide choice to our diverse team members. We ended in a much reduced plenary closing session. It was still impressive that we had about 10 people till the end. Considering time zones and a customer in need that required our attention.

This is not the beginning nor is it the end of taking care of mental wellness at Giant Swarm.

I will end with a paraphrase on Oliver Thylmann, one of the Giant Swarm founders (he may have been paraphrasing someone else).

Most everybody will answer an email on Sunday night at 7pm, but not many will go to the cinema at 3pm on a Tuesday.

Take care of yourselves people!