Discover why business leaders prioritise Fika for their teams

How do you build a team of mental athletes at work? Use mental fitness to boost productivity, overcome burnout, and achieve peak performance.

Anxiety is the theme for mental health awareness week this year. As a Psychologist, I could write a whole article on the science of anxiety. 

Stress is a reflection of poor working practices and behaviours. The best way to manage stress is to take action, and stop it at the source. So, when I saw the theme for Stress Awareness Month 2023, I breathed a sigh of relief. 

Our mental health isn't something we should only pay attention to when we're struggling. Psychologists have been working on a recipe for both success and happiness. And mental fitness is the key ingredient. And just like our physical fitness, it’s something that we need to work on proactively. 

The jargon approach to wellbeing can make it hard to talk about important topics and can lead to inaction. Being overly focused on a concept rather than the behaviours that help lead to it, doesn’t make work any better, in fact it likely makes it less inclusive.

In March 2023, Fika surveyed 202 workers in the US (working a minimum of 30 hours per week) to better understand current workplace wellbeing trends. Here's what we found.

Workplace wellbeing is in a state of decline, with rising numbers of UK workers struggling with poor wellbeing. There are countless wellbeing initiatives available, but many fail to get to the heart of dysfunctional working practices. Zurich Municipal’s partner, Fika, have developed team training software to support teams to work together more effectively and healthily.

At Fika, we’ve shown that our individual training works. Having launched team training software, we wanted to make sure it was equally effective.

Fika is honoured to name Brian Posner as Executive Chair of Fika, effective the 1st of February 2023. Having previously served as the company's non-Executive Chair, Mr Posner will not only serve shareholders as Chair of Fika’s board, but support Fika’s leadership team on the planning and implementation of our strategy. 

Much has been made of the impact that the pandemic had on workers’ wellbeing. But our data shows that we’re certainly not out of the woods yet. Fika surveyed 650 workers in the UK to better understand current workplace wellbeing trends.

The awareness that makes us great managers doesn’t come from a one off manager training course but from daily moments where we practise good communication, compassion and inclusion. And most importantly, knowing we need to practise these skills when we’re stressed and pressure is high, not just during the good times. So, what skills should we focus on when training managers? At Fika we have created a series of exercises that identify 4 trainable behaviours that help managers to support themselves and their people. 

Just like physical fitness is made up of different systems and structures, so is mental fitness - the 7 skills of mental fitness which include; confidence, positivity, focus, motivation, meaning, connection and stress management. At Fika we have validated our own proprietary mental fitness scale to quantify the role that mental fitness plays in these outcomes at an individual, team and organisational level. While also using it to inform our smart recommendation engine.

Fika is proud to announce it has launched with the US-based market research firm Healogix Consulting LLC as the first US-based client for its fully integrated, micro-training, Mental Fitness platform.

Walking the thin line between burning bright and burning out is a challenge in the modern world of work. Despite employers best efforts, people are still exhausted, detached, and feeling "stuck". But burnout is rarely about the individual. It's about the environment where the individual works in. We surveyed the workforce to find out and developed a new approach to burnout prevention that tackles it at an organisational level.

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Not all exclusion is direct and intentional. The majority of exclusions we experience are micro-exclusions i.e. small behaviours that go under the radar but when experienced consistently are causal in our feelings of individual exclusion. As a result, people often come to believe that things will never change and, eventually, leave their roles. At Fika, we propose some micro-behaviour changes you and your teams should make that will help your colleagues feel more included.

Team morale is essential for effective collaboration and results. However, with our world of work changing rapidly, it has never been more difficult to keep teams engaged, committed, and connected.

Temperatures have dropped and summer is well and truly over. And as sunrise gets later so does our wake up time which means early morning runs and gym routines start to slide.

At Fika we champion flexibility by being a remote first business. However, working remotely can be daunting at first, especially for new hires. So, we sat down for a conversation with one of our team members to learn more about his experience.

More than 1/4 of new hires leave a company within 6 weeks. More than 1/3 leave in the first 6 months. And of those who leave in the first year, half were thinking of leaving for 6 months or more. The impact of disengaged, one-foot-out-the-door employees on existing employees and clients is well known not to mention their reduced productivity levels and larger number of errors (Jaman et al, 2002). 

Flexible working patterns (location and hours) remain the number one sought employee benefit. The opportunities to avoid rush hour traffic, to walk children to school and to repurpose commute times to exercise have all been cited as key quality of life reasons to continue working flexibly.

As the dust settles and we assess life after lockdown, we will need to equip today’s learners with the skills they need to rebuild the economy, culture and society. Further education and post-16 education will play a vital role in this rebuilding – ‘ensuring more people can gain the skills they need to get ahead as the Skills Minister notes.

I'd been told returning from maternity leave would be challenging ... but no one could have prepared me for how tough it would be.

Fika Co-Founder & Co-CEO shares the 'why' behind Fika Mental Fitness

When are we going to start celebrating it, not just keep trying to 'fix' it?

Earlier this week I spoke about the importance of building mental fitness before different career transitions. It was a timely reminder as I’m currently going through undoubtedly the biggest transition in my career to date.

I’m sure at some point in our career we’ve all sat in front of a line manager and had a conversation about how overwhelmed or overworked we feel.

I am a Sports Psychologist, and in sport, we take career transitions extremely seriously. We spend a huge amount of time working with athletes to better prepare them for the next stage of their career. Whether that be moving from junior to senior competition or preparing for life after sport.

The truth is it’s no wonder we’re so bad at acknowledging our mental fitness as our own responsibility, when as a society we haven’t been given the knowledge, skills or value system that would enable us to manage it. 

‍Fika and NCFE have worked together to recover vital career skills like connection, confidence and motivation for more than 18,000 young people across 69 further education centres in the wake of COVID-19

A new study has shown that over 54% of workers who take two or more mental health absences would ultimately leave their current job with the direct cost of absences throughout 2021 estimated to be a shocking £43 billion (excluding additional costs such as overtime, temporary staff, admin fees etc)

Today Fika Mental Fitness is proud to announce we are one of the 21 digital health companies selected for DigitalHealth.London’s Accelerator programme. The 21 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) selected for the Accelerator 2022 programme have digital solutions or services that have the highest potential to meet London’s NHS and social care challenges.

Fika Mental Fitness has been selected as one of the The Elite 200, the acclaimed list of semifinalists in The GSV Cup — the world’s largest pitch competition for EdTech startups run by female-led, multi-stage venture capital firm GSV Ventures. 

DFS Group has joined forces with Fika Mental Fitness to embed mental fitness training into its employee experience - aiming to improve staff engagement and productivity, and proactively train its people in how to be the best versions of themselves.

The Great Resignation. COVID-19. Hybrid. Today’s managers and leaders face the perfect storm of headwinds – and two years on from the start of the pandemic, they’re running on empty.

‘What tools and techniques can I give to my staff to help them better manage stress?’ This is one of the most common requests that I get as a Psychologist. And it’s a perfectly reasonable request in view of the fact that last year UK employees were found to be working an extra 2 hours each day. 

Culture starts at the top - so as leaders, the first step we can take to creating a culture of mental fitness in our organisations is to become mental fitness role models ourselves. 

COVID-19. Hybrid. The Great Resignation. Mass reports of staff burnout.

When it comes to important conversations - don't underestimate the power of active listening.

Fika Mental Fitness has partnered with Zurich Municipal insurance to address mental health in education - as four in five school leaders say mental health is the biggest challenge facing their organisation.

Housebuilder Crest Nicholson has today announced a pioneering new partnership with mental fitness platform Fika to proactively prevent mental health decline and improve performance by building the mental fitness skills of its 700 employees.

When it comes to talking - there's talking, and there's really talking, isn't there?

Breakfast with family, longer sleep, quieter space to focus, few unwelcome interruptions, you would be forgiven for thinking that hybrid working was one of the few perfect outcomes from a two year long pandemic. It presents a crystal clear antidote for those employees who want to keep in person social connections with colleagues and those who have found their true life balance in working from home.

What if a digital solution existed that had the potential to grant permission and structure for every employee in the workplace to have a voice and be heard? Would this increase their sense of belonging and inclusion? And more importantly, could it tackle the lack of diversity in some workplaces?

Recent reports into the great resignation suggest as many as a quarter of us are intending to leave our jobs within the next six months, and resignation rates are already at their highest since 2009. The financial impact of this mass exodus could be enormous, with the average cost of employee turnover in those earning over £25,000 a year estimated to be £30,614.

Taking time off is essential for wellbeing. Our physical and mental health benefit from hitting pause. But many of us are unable to keep the pause button on. We check our emails, our messaging channels and even attend some meetings in our downtime. A staggering 65% of us eat into our leave time with work, making it a regular, almost expected occurrence. 

The rise in agile, digital and knowledge-based businesses is making effective teamwork more important than ever, as companies compete to innovate. At the same time, the increase in remote working is challenging teams in ways they’ve never been challenged before. So, what can businesses do to ensure confident and cohesive team performance, despite the challenges that come with working remotely?