The London start-ups supporting workplace wellness

Across the UK people are starting to realise that poor mental health is a growing issue. According to AnxietyUK, one in six adults experience some form of “neurotic health problem”, with anxiety and depression being the most common.

With the cost of mental health-related absence in the UK workplace reportedly totalling £7.9 billion in 2017, it’s not surprising that many London Office are embracing the growing trend of ‘workplace wellness’ startups. Here are some examples of startups tackling poor mental health in our 9-5 lives.

Spill

 Spill, is a London-based therapy chat app aiming to improve access to counselling. Companies pay to access Spill’s services, and then offer it as a benefit to their employees.

“From day one, our goal has been to make therapy more accessible to people,” explains Dhesi, the co-founder of Spill. “The business route meant we could get revenue from the employer themselves, but for the people who are benefiting from Spill it’s free at the point of use.”

With companies like Monzo and Rightmove among its client base, Spill is already making a difference to huge workforces. The average person spends more than 80,000 hours in the workplace over a lifetime and more employers are realising that to get happy employees, you need an overall happy person. Spill is helping employers make this a reality.

Unmind

Unmind, offers interactive content, including bite-sized programmes lasting five minutes a day helping users to improve focus, sleep better at night, and talk to someone. All of Unmind’s programmes are developed with clinicians and academics, and seems to be having a positive impact, with 92 per cent of employees using Unmind have shown improvements in wellbeing.

Unmind investor Felix Capital’s co-founder Antoine Nussenbaum explained: “Meditation has been radically facilitated by smartphones [but] we feel a genuine need to go much deeper at an individual level and, thanks to technology, deliver this in a scalable way. This is what Unmind is about.”

Levell

After burning-out in her previous job, Madeleine Evans created the wellbeing management platform Levell.

Levell is a tool helping employees to manage stress and prevent burnout. Users log their “levels” a few times a week, noting their mood, stress and energy. Levell detects patterns and suggests ways to manage and improve the office environment to the employer. “That can be anything from providing spaces for people to get to know each other, to offering a subsidised gym membership,” says Evans.