Mental health has become a central issue for organisations seeking to build more sustainable workplaces. Anwen Cooper, Mission Director at Thrivall, explores how changing the way companies approach employee wellbeing could contribute to a more sustainable future for both people and organisations.
As part of our summer break, the impact.info
You can also find our article on the topic right here
Enjoy listening!
Killian Flagey
impact.info director
Published on 27 August 2026
Transcript Audio in English· AI-generated transcript
0:00 Hello and welcome to the podcast for those using business to make positive changes. The 0:10 UK company Thrivewall aims to boost employee well-being by offering individual and whole 0:15 team support in the workplace. Investing in good mental health can boost a company's profits 0:21 by 12%, as Anwen Cooper, Thrivewall's Mission Director, explains. 0:27 Hi, I'm Anwen Cooper and I am the Mission Director and Co-Founder at Thrivewall. So 0:33 we are a very mission-driven business and everything that we do is about delivering 0:41 ongoing, sustained, year-round proactive support to develop people to their full potential 0:48 and create high-performing teams and ultimately helping those organisations that we partner 0:53 with to deliver on their mission. 0:57 So how did this come about? How did you get the idea to pursue this? 1:03 The business is a partnership and I have a co-founder, Dan Corp, so we came together 1:09 to create Thrivewall together. We both have had our own separate businesses prior to Thrivewall 1:17 but then about 10 years ago we both set up consulting businesses. Mine was a marketing 1:22 strategy consulting business and Dan's was in relationship building and supporting SMEs 1:28 to win new business. And then we became involved with a business mastermind group and also 1:35 became trustees of a mental health charity and learning a lot about mental health from 1:40 that experience as well. And then during the lockdown period, Dan had time to enrol in 1:47 a training course which was a one-year foundation certificate in counselling skills. He just 1:53 wanted to learn more about counselling skills and understand how they might support people 1:59 in the workplace to work together more effectively. And from that course he learned about a concept 2:05 called proactive counselling which, as the name suggests, is where you have counselling 2:10 even if you're not struggling. You may not be suffering from poor mental health but understanding 2:16 that we can all benefit from counselling conversations and that was really the seed 2:22 of the idea for Thrivewall. So through a Thrivewall programme basically we match people within 2:28 businesses or organisations that we work with with fully qualified person-centred counsellors 2:33 who are also coaches and we give them one-to-one support to talk about whatever challenges 2:39 they might be facing or positive goals that they're working towards. And it's blending 2:44 counselling and coaching in those conversations which we call personal check-in sessions. 2:50 Before you set this up, how did you know that there was a demand for something like this 2:55 among employers? How did you find that out? We've seen close up the stresses and strains 3:02 that people are under when they're working in organisations. Whether that's the leaders at the 3:07 top who are struggling with all of the pressure that comes with that responsibility or perhaps 3:15 middle managers who maybe some of them are in a management role for the first time or perhaps 3:21 more junior people as well, you know, people starting out in their career and just needing 3:27 a bit of support really to feel comfortable and confident in their role at work. Give me a 3:32 concrete example of a company that has asked you to come in and what exactly are the results? 3:38 What feedback have you had in terms of improvement? So we don't tend to work with toxic cultures 3:46 or organisations where they have lots of people problems. They're generally companies that are 3:50 already doing the right thing and caring for their people and creating a really good place to work 3:58 and they want to take things up to the next level and be truly exceptional. So they want to win 4:03 those kind of awards for best employer and, you know, best place to work and that kind of thing. 4:08 So a really good example of a client that we've worked with, they were founder-led business. 4:15 They definitely had the pioneering innovative mindset and wanted to try something new and 4:20 they had already, before we had been working with them, committed to a local initiative for 4:26 healthy workplaces. So it was a certification that they could sign up to and they had progressed 4:32 from bronze to silver to gold and basically as we've been working with them they are now in 4:38 their third year of a Thrival programme. They have now gone to the platinum level so that's really 4:43 rewarding to see that sort of recognition. We've also had some really great feedback that they can 4:52 kind of really see the difference that we've been making and obviously the fact they've continued 4:56 on for three years with the programme shows that they're getting really great value and understand 5:02 the impact that it's having for their business. How do you measure the impact with a company like 5:08 that of the service you provide to them? Is it measurable? Yeah, so we have designed the Thrival 5:15 programme to be measurable and we've built our own Employee Engagement and Wellbeing Survey 5:22 which is a sort of longitudinal study that goes through the length of the programme. We're not 5:28 diagnosing mental health or mental illness, we are not clinicians, we're not prescribing 5:33 treatments or anything like that so it's not a sort of medical model that we use and it is 5:39 obviously a subjective measure because people are just expressing how they're feeling and they're 5:45 assessing their own personal well-being and in addition to that data that we're collecting and 5:51 obviously all the KPIs that a business would have anyway, they can already kind of track their own 5:56 productivity and things like staff absence due to sickness and some companies will also track 6:03 reasons for sickness absence and could potentially attribute that to specifically 6:09 poor mental health. We can also ask them to track things like employee turnover and recruitment 6:16 costs and things like that. Why is mental health in the workplace such a hot topic at the moment 6:22 and so important for employers to consider? So I think in recent years there's been a lot of work 6:28 done to raise awareness about mental health, however if you look at the statistics sadly 6:36 the numbers of people suffering with poor mental health and taking things to the extreme 6:45 end of the spectrum in terms of the number of people completing suicide and also attempting 6:52 suicide, we know that those numbers sadly are not improving so there's definitely a problem 6:58 and that's part of what we want to be solving and there's a real impact in terms of what that 7:05 means for business. So we've looked at data as I've said we know that two in ten people on average 7:12 are struggling with some form of mental health symptom. We know also the number of days on average 7:20 that people are off sick as a result of poor mental health so we know it's costing the economy 7:26 money in terms of people not being economically productive, people requiring medical treatment 7:35 and then all of the sort of social costs associated with that. There's also other risks 7:41 associated with poor mental health at work you know it could negatively impact the business in 7:45 many different ways so people might turn up to work not feeling great, they make a mistake or 7:51 they upset a colleague or they upset a client and the ramifications of that could be huge 7:57 depending on the nature of the business, it could even result in loss of life worst case scenario 8:03 and then on the flip side to turn it into a positive when people are well resourced and feeling 8:09 like they're at their best actually there's a real potential uplift in people's productivity 8:15 so that they can really kind of be developed to their full potential and go above and beyond 8:22 and yeah there is also evidence that shows and can put number on that one report that we like 8:29 to cite says that investment in good mental health has been shown to increase productivity by as much 8:35 as 12% so when you think about what that means for business bottom line in terms of increased 8:40 productivity and profitability it can be really tangible. That brings up the whole area of 8:46 sustainability then for a business. I think sustainability is a bit of a buzzword particularly 8:52 in the impact investing and impact driven business world from our perspective sustainability 9:00 usually has come to mean things relating to the environment and the natural world 9:06 so we talk about sustainability in relation to things like carbon, energy use, the environment, 9:13 nature, climate change etc. What we're trying to do is move the conversation around sustainability 9:20 more towards humans and why do we have all these big problems in the first place why do we have 9:26 biodiversity loss why do we have pollution it's in large part because of human behavior right so 9:31 we need to become better humans. In terms of how this relates to business 9:37 we like to talk about the triple bottom line about people planet and profit and yes we need to care 9:42 for the planet but we also need to care for our people because if people are not well resourced 9:47 and don't feel like they have the capacity to look after themselves how are they ever going to look 9:52 after anyone else and care for other people and the planet so for us they're all really closely 9:58 interlinked and we really want to create a world where people feel not just sustained by their work 10:06 and the organization that they're part of but actually ideally ultimately regenerated so we're 10:12 really interested in the idea of going beyond sustainability into regenerative business 10:16 so it's really sort of turning that whole model of a more extractive business approach on its head 10:24 where perhaps in the old kind of industrial model we think about coming into work and 10:29 leaving exhausted and depleted at the end of the day we'd really love to flip the script on that. 10:35 That was impact.info doing things differently Embed this interview on your site
Show this player directly on your site to share the interview with your audience.
Copy embed code View generated code
![[Rebroadcast] Why strive for optimum mental health for all of a company's employees?](/_next/image?url=%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F05%2FAnwen-Cooper-min.png&w=1920&q=75)
