Today’s the first day of Mental Health Awareness week. This year’s theme is kindness – and all our blogs this week will focus around this. So we wanted to kick off the week with a story on how one team at the University has embraced their wellbeing. It is an inspirational story of kindness.

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Hi, I’m Michelle Devitt, Team Leader of the Health Faculty’s Recruitment, Events & Engagement Team and I have written this blog on behalf of our ‘Dream Team’, well at least that is what we call ourselves ?. It’s been an exceptionally busy 9 weeks for the team working from home, and like you all, it’s been coupled with successes and difficulties. But overriding all of this is how proud we are of what we have achieved. And so we decided to actively engage in last week’s ‘Working Well Week’, to spread a little happiness with each other every day and also to reflect on what is important to us right now and what we are grateful for.

The week started with the creation of a ‘Working Well Week’ channel on our Teams site, with an inspiring piece of text from the ‘Spread a little happiness’ blog shared by Juliet Flynn, and it was joyful to see the individual responses from the team. Some things that make us grateful and happy jotted down by the team won’t come as a surprise to you; the sun, walks, speedy internet, Spotify, Netflix and our pets (aka the gremlins)…. Not sounding too extraordinary are we! But how about this – extra time with my children, spending time in our lovely house and garden and, trust me, some tear inducing love for family here with us and also sadly no longer.

We have re-kindled our love of Harry Potter (sorry Sandra), listened to anthem songs such as ‘Hold On’ by Wilson Phillips (yikes – that will be stuck in your brain now, I’ll guarantee it) and actually realised how lucky we are to have our jobs.

We are an operational team, so words are not enough and we jumped, well.. sat, into action, and virtually (over Teams video) completed a 10-minute Chair Pilates class. I’m not going to lie, I think I have missed my calling as a Pilates Instructor – but you will have to ask my team about that. We took part in a team quiz on Thursday with our fellow business team (thank you David) and we have all completed the Staff Wellbeing Pulse survey.

We don’t know what today holds in store for us, but I know I look forward to the lovely ladies logging onto our Teams site this morning and adding something special to our ‘Working Well Week’ channel and thankfully seeing them virtually (hooray for video cams) throughout their day completing a mountain of work and supporting our academics. But one thing is for sure, I set my Out of Office at 17:00 on Friday for a week and know that I will return to a well run ship that hasn’t even noticed I have been gone – now that definitely is something to be grateful for.

Michelle Devitt, Recruitment, Events & Engagement Team