Trust issues: why the Retail Trust is uniting retail workers during Mental Health Awareness week
By Chris Brook-Carter, chief executive of the Retail Trust
Next week is Mental Health Awareness Week and to mark the occasion, we’re bringing together more than a thousand retail workers at Together Fest in London to help them protect and improve their wellbeing.
This will be our third Together Fest, the Retail Trust’s annual wellbeing festival for retail staff. And, hosted by Anna ‘Mutha Pucka’ Whitehouse, dozens of wellbeing experts, high profile speakers and fitness instructors will join us on Thursday to immerse attendees in a 360 wellbeing experience.
There will be a full day of talks, masterclasses and interactive sessions covering everything from mindfulness and men’s mental health to managing money and the menopause, all designed to provide people with plenty of new ideas to support their wellbeing, in and outside the workplace.
We first launched Together Fest in 2022 to bring to life what the Retail Trust has always stood for; equipping people with the right tools to improve their wellbeing – mental, physical, financial and more – and instilling a sense of pride in working in the UK’s retail industry.
Two years on, 200 of our retail partners including New Look, Dunelm and The Entertainer will bring their teams back to the event this year, demonstrating their ongoing commitment to improving and protecting employee wellbeing. Not only because they believe it is the right thing to do but because they also understand the impact it has on their business’s creativity, productivity, profitability and sustainability.
This is also central to the Retail Trust’s new happiness dashboard, which shows retailers the financial value of initiatives to protect mental health by proving the impact they have on reducing absenteeism and presenteeism and increasing retention to strengthen the bottom line. But employers who fail to take the value of workplace wellbeing into account risk more of their staff having to take time off, work while unwell, or leave their jobs altogether.
And that’s why, alongside providing a brilliantly restorative day out, we also want Together Fest to serve as a rallying cry to employers, the industry and society in general that the health and the happiness of our colleagues really matters. They are intrinsic to the success of retail and to all other sectors
The line-up for this year’s event is the best we’ve had, so we know this year’s Together Fest is going to be another joyful, inspiring and entertaining day. I’m looking forward to meeting lots of you there. But, if we’re not already supporting your staff to improve their wellbeing, please do get in touch with us to explore how the Retail Trust can help.
