Most of us spend about one third of our waking life at work. It’s a big part of our daily lives and can have a considerable effect on our mental health – in a positive or negative way.

Under NSW Government’s Mentally Healthy Workplaces Strategy, SafeWork NSW works to support organisations large and small to promote positive mental health (and by doing so to improve their productivity and performance). It delivers free programs and services. SafeWork NSW engaged Ellis Jones to work with its specialist to structure and write content for its new website, and then to bring the stories of its audience to life through video case studies, highlighting the positive impact workplaces have achieved.

With so much of our time spent at work, the workplace is a key setting to help address Australia’s mental health crisis. Getting things right at work, whether a local store, a construction site, a hospital or a multinational, means more people in healthy, safe workplaces, doing meaningful work – and more people with positive mental health. Economically, we all stand to benefit. Because organisations with positive mental health practices achieve better outcomes, for their people, as well as their productivity and profits.

Ellis Jones worked with SafeWork NSW experts to understand, structure, review and write content for a new website which would deliver organisations of all sizes and sectors the tools they needed for better mental health (customised for managers and workers). Our approach applied plain language principles, as well as rhetorical and linguistic tools to inform, engage and educate simultaneously for an audience as diverse as the entire working NSW population.

To showcase the outcomes an organisation can achieve through adopting the tools promoted by SafeWork NSW, Ellis Jones then worked with five diverse organisations that had completed the mentally healthy workplaces (MHW) programs. The participants included both metro and regionally-based NSW organisations, working in the areas of sport, manufacturing, aviation, technology and construction.

Each organisation faces a unique set of challenges when it comes to promoting good mental health. Through discovery interviews with participants and HR representatives, Ellis Jones developed story outlines that enabled the authentic telling of each organisation’s unique journey to becoming a mentally healthy workplace.

The process allowed key voices – from executive management and HR to frontline workers – to share their distinct perspectives, exploring the impact of the programs on wellbeing, culture, productivity and resilience.

Ellis Jones has delivered highly relatable and usable web content, productively delivering information and education to a diverse audience.

The videos have been used to promote the program to prospective future participants, and to promote changed behaviour more broadly in NSW workplaces.

The content has been used and repurposed to highlight the importance of mentally healthy workplaces, across key events including RUOK Day and World Mental Health month.