Mental health action plan
We founded Register Dynamics with a desire to apply a more human set of values to our work. We wanted to build a team that the best people wanted to join and we knew that would require putting human needs at the heart of how we run our business.
We’ve applied our values in lots of different ways over the years, such as in our generous pensions offer and our parental leave package that doesn’t force new parents back into work before they’re ready. I’m immensely proud of how we treat our staff and ourselves with respect. Getting to choose to do things like this is one of my favourite things about working at Register Dynamics.
Mental health and wellbeing is rarely straightforward for anyone, including me. It matters a lot to me that we support everyone at Register Dynamics with their mental health, to the same standard that we apply in other areas. So towards the end of 2025 we signed the Mental Health at Work Commitment.
This is not marketing puff (although we will proudly talk about how we support our staff in our marketing) – it’s a genuine proactive commitment to make real change for the better.
Why we care about your mental health
We believe making a proactive change to support mental health is important because (in order of least to most selfish):
We have a moral and ethical responsibility to you – our position as your employer should not be a capitalist, transactional and exploitative relationship; work is an enormous part of our lives, and we believe that as humans we have a responsibility to care for the other humans that make up our company.
It helps us attract and retain people – we believe other people who share our values will be more likely to want to work with us if they know their existing or future mental health issues will be treated with compassion and respect.
All evidence points to a positive economic return on investment – all of the studies into mental health in the workplace have concluded that spending money on mental health has a positive ROI (e.g. the company makes £1.40 more for each £1 it spends), mainly due to reduction in mental health related sick leave.
Makes project management simpler – staff absence due to mental health in a small business of experts like ours creates management headaches that are difficult to resolve and often have knock-on impacts on the mental health of managers; supporting staff to be mentally healthier helps this problem go away.
An overview of our plan
Our plan at a high level, which is based on the six standards of the Mental Health at Work Commitment, is to:
Co-design a detailed action plan with you – that’s this plan
Design work to support wellbeing – which means avoiding your work being a negative impact on your mental health because of the way we ask you to work or what we ask you to work on
Raise awareness and tackle stigma – many people don’t feel comfortable addressing mental health at work or don’t think it is ‘workplace appropriate’; we will softly start to change this attitude if it exists
Help managers provide support – your manager will have the training and resources to respond to your issues or risks; research has shown this is perhaps the most important standard of all
Provide tools and services – there are lots of ways to stay mentally healthy, and we will pay for you to access the ones that will make the most difference
Monitor and report openly – we will talk about what we’ve found, what we’re doing, and how effective it’s been, and that starts with publishing this plan openly
We also have some principles about what we’re trying to avoid:
Having a one-size-fits-all approach or “corporate” policy – we’ll still focus on whatever works for you as an individual
Requiring people to speak openly – you’ll be able to contribute or access support anonymously
Relying on mandatory e-learning for everything – cultural change is more than just slide decks…
Collecting ineffective metrics – we actually want to achieve our goal, not tick boxes!
What we found and what we’re doing
Because we’re a team of data-driven problem solvers, and because we actually care about getting things right, we don’t want to just do the same things everyone else does and hope for the best. We want to come up with meaningful actions that address the problems that affect us, in a way that maintains our flexibility towards individuals.
We started by carrying out an anonymous employee survey to review our staff wellbeing and discussed the results together as a team. Our action plan has been formed by trying to address the things we found that need improvement.
In general, we found that most people feel physically well, and a bit less mentally well.
People feel generally happy. People feel some anxiety, ranging from not much to quite a lot.
Leave and work/life balance
The good news: people feel like they have the flexibility to live their life outside of work. This is a good sign as it's something we value highly at Register Dynamics.
But in general, taking time off is an area where Register Dynamics has the most to improve. People said they feel guilty about not working long or hard enough and about taking leave at all. People said they keep working even if they don’t feel fully well, again through guilt about letting down the rest of the team or needing to keep up to perform highly.
Some people said that they felt they needed to reserve leave to handle care responsibilities. People also said they take leave to recover from work. Neither of these things should be happening – leave is there to be enjoyed; work that requires time off for recovery is unsustainable and needs to be fixed.
We ran a co-design session to understand what we’d need from a new leave policy. As well as sharing some of the difficulties you have with taking leave, you also expressed some of the positives with our existing policy. It’s not clear that a systemic change to how we handle leave will fix things (or even what that change would be), so instead we’ll focus on improving the approach and expectations around taking leave.
To help everyone develop the correct work/life balance, we will:
Build leave time into all project plans and remind people when starting projects that this is expected, so that everyone feels comfortable taking leave on client engagements
Explain the company’s approach to each of the situations raised in the workshop so that everyone is clear that they will always be able to take leave when necessary (e.g. in a family emergency, you are empowered to take all the leave you need, and can e.g. borrow leave against a future year to make that work)
Target our consultants being engaged with clients for 200 working days per year, so that bench time is expected to be restful and no one should feel the need to work at 100% all of the time
Give everyone the option to reduce their working days with a more flexible part-time approach, giving them more time for life outside of work
We have a number of staff who already work part-time, including some who have transitioned from full-time to part-time, and back
Send regular reminders of how far through the leave year we are and how much leave people would have taken if using it uniformly, giving everyone a regular opportunity to reflect on if they are taking all of the leave they can
Explore how we could encourage everyone to practice self-care regularly, to help people remain rested during normal working conditions
Working together as a team
Unfortunately, as might be somewhat expected for a fully-remote team that mostly works from home, many people also said that they felt lonely whilst working. While people said they generally felt supported by their manager and their colleagues, they also feel like they could spend more time learning from their colleagues.
To help people feel more connected to others, we will:
Offer everyone regular space in a co-working space near them in a flexible way (i.e. whatever pattern and frequency of days as required), including equipment needed to work well in this space (e.g. headphones, laptop stands, portable keyboards)
We have already been doing this with one member of staff, varied the working pattern as their needs changed, and finally retired their subscription when they no longer needed it
Hold in-person days for the whole team to connect with each other, fully paid for (inc. travel and accommodation) and on a regular basis but scheduled to work with everyone’s life commitments
We have regularly held in-person Blogathons for us to collaborate on writing topics together
We have an annual Christmas celebration and have started having 2 or 3 other in-person away days per year
Establish more informal, ad-hoc mentorings between team members for skills sharing, focusing on proactive learning and confidence building in areas of intellectual interest rather than incidental project support
Review whether we have the correct tools for presence and communication (i.e. check if Slack is the best we can do, and if there is any value in other options)
We held a session on tools that made presence more explicit, or had “always-on” voice chat, but there was not clear consensus that these would improve things
Job satisfaction and work design
People said they felt like the things they do in life are worthwhile, and that they were satisfied with their work. People felt in control of their work, clear on what their role is, and broadly could manage the demands their roles place on them. Everyone said they’d recommend Register Dynamics as a place to work, which is wonderful feedback to receive!
Some people feel there are competing demands on their time at work and that they struggle to find time and focus to do everything. This sometimes results in people feeling like they need to work more than their usual hours to get everything done.
We will:
Offer everyone managerial support to manage workload and time, including building in time for internal things (like Blogathons and Dealer’s Choice) into plans with our clients
Progression and pay rises
Money is a big source of anxiety for some people. Rising cost of living impacts people with financial dependents and caring responsibilities most strongly. Some people also said that they don’t feel like they spend enough time talking about their career progress or how to get a pay rise. Historically, we have rewarded people’s progression but not had much discussion or offered proactive support to enable it.
Keeping the business financially healthy and growing sustainably has been a goal for us since our inception. It means we can offer staff long-term financial stability – there has never been a time where we have risked our ability to pay our staff by chasing an unsustainable business model. Whilst the easiest-sounding option might be just to give everyone a pay rise, we can’t do that by itself without undermining this commitment. We think that putting the business on shakier financial footing may lead to as much anxiety.
So, our plan is to:
Introduce regular conversations about progression and focus the individual goals on what we need to build a more valuable business that can pay people more
Offer bonuses for referring us to someone that we hire or introducing us to a new client that we work with
Develop a more proactive and comprehensive approach to training, using the right mix of internal sessions, external courses, on-the-job development and mentorships as above for each individual
Make development of this approach a more first-class activity, with a named person who’ll be responsible for it
Be more proactive about developing thought leadership in areas of intellectual interest
Attitude towards mental health in the workplace
We were pleased to discover that there isn’t a huge problem with stigma around mental health. People said that it’s appropriate to discuss and address mental health in our workplace, and everyone agreed that they’d feel comfortable if a colleague talked to them about a mental health problem.
Despite willingness to listen themselves, people felt generally less comfortable talking about their own mental health problems with a colleague. We think this is an understandable fear around being vulnerable when we don’t know what stigmas our colleagues hold. In the group discussion, people said that just knowing their colleagues were open to listening was already a big help.
To encourage everyone to feel able to share with others, we will:
Regularly discuss mental health topics as a team, to help people develop comfort talking about it and give people opportunities to share
We’ve run Dealer’s Choice (Friday show and tell) sessions on Mental Health Awareness Week, Stress Awareness Week and the Science of Stress
Run Compassion Practices when we are in-person with each other, to give colleagues a dedicated moment to share and listen
We’ve run the 5 Minute Pause Space and 10 Minute Pause Space at our Blogathons and team days
Encourage and support people to share their own experiences, both formally as prose and informally in conversation
Al Norman published a blog post about how he manages his own mental health at RD
Lead by example: Simon and Andy will try to be more open with discussing their own mental health, to help shape a culture of it being safe to share
Giving managers the right tools
We mentioned at the start that we want to continue taking a very individual and personal approach to mental health that adapts to each person’s needs. Many of the actions in our plan require us to understand everyone’s goals, needs and circumstances to a greater level of detail than has been needed before.
Offering better support is also contingent on us having a forward-looking approach – not just reacting to issues, but preparing for moments of vulnerability. Whilst we have regular one-to-one sessions with everyone, these have been largely unstructured and not particularly proactive – and also tend to slip into talking about current project work rather than pastoral things.
To give us the things we need to help best, we will:
Develop a default standing agenda for one-to-one sessions, including career progress, pay rise approach, loneliness and working environment, self-care and leave, active mentorships, and areas of interest to develop. Of course, we’ll adapt this to individual needs and be flexible to whatever needs discussing
Encourage everyone to be forward-looking about their own mental health by using a wellness action plan or similar, and to share this with their manager if they feel able
Explore how to keep one-to-ones focused on non-client needs, potentially by having the manager devoted to pastoral care being separate from someone they are working with on a client project
Checking the impact of what we’re doing
This plan will need to adapt as our circumstances change – what you are reading is just one version of it. We need to keep reviewing how well people feel and trying new things to improve that, and ensure that everyone (including new team members) is aware of what we are doing to support them.
To ensure that new problems and current progress are visible, we will:
Run an anonymous survey at least annually, review the results as a team, and update our action plan in response
We ran the first survey in 2025 and will run it again alongside this plan for 2026
Publish our plan openly on the website and include links to it from recruitment material, so that new team members can see what help we can provide and discuss this with us prior to starting if they need to
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to give feedback on the plan, you can start a discussion publicly in Slack, start a discussion privately with either or both of us, or use the anonymous postbox .
Signed by:
Simon Worthington
Director
Andy Bennett
Director