Customer testimonial: Wilde Ganzen

For 65 years, Wilde Ganzen has been supporting tacklers around the world who want to break through poverty from the bottom up. The Mental Move may contribute to the sustainable employability of the employees of Wilde Ganzen. How exactly we do that we discussed with Mariska Staal – HRM advisor at Wilde Ganzen.

Last November, the collaboration with The Mental Move began. Mariska explains that in order to take a preventive approach, she created a vitality policy. “That was a nice task for me, which the COVID period gave an extra push to. We also wanted to reduce (long-term) absenteeism,” Mariska says. “We noticed that employees developed more mental complaints during the COVID period, because some employees kept to themselves a lot and sometimes found it difficult to balance work and private life. I then started looking for a way to facilitate good, accessible help. Through word of mouth I heard about The Mental Move, which came together very nicely with the need for coaching we had.”

According to Mariska, if you don’t commit to mental health prevention, you’re only doing stopgap measures to prevent people from dropping out. Instead, they were looking for a way to engage in absence prevention in a structured way at the front door, so that you prevent people from overstepping their bounds.

The Mental Move launched the partnership with kick-off webinars for employees. These webinars aimed to kick off and explain the collaboration. Subsequently, all employees were given access to the prevention platform and Periodic Medical Examination (PMO). Also, psychologists through the Mental Help Desk are always available for extra help, care or a sparring session. Employees can schedule this themselves, without notifying the employer. Periodically, themed workshops take place for both employees and managers and they receive a newsletter, in order to draw attention to information around mental health.

“The offer of The Mental Move is very diverse, you not only have 1 on 1 conversations, but also the webinars, the prevention platform and the newsletters. It’s really the total package that gives people more insight into their mental health and what you can do about it yourself preventively.”
– Wilde Ganzen

Mariska goes on to explain, “The PMO gave us a lot of insight into where we are now. We took the PMO in the COVID period, so you can see that this still had quite an impact on the mental balance, which scored a lot lower. We also saw that lifestyle has a lot of influence. As an organization, you can’t always influence that with your employees, but we do try to raise awareness. The Mental Move helps with that too. We also managed to reduce absenteeism.”

Cooperation with The Mental Move runs like a thread through the organization. For example, Mariska says that the PMO has recently been included in the progress meetings and a theme workshop is regularly held. “The way we have rolled through the COVID period as an organization, I am quite proud of that. The sick leave figure was quite low,” Mariska says.

“The Mental Move really contributes to the vitality of our employees. The fact that they know they have somewhere to turn when they get stuck gives them peace of mind. It also contributes to lower absenteeism. With this collaboration we show that as an organization we think it is important that employees feel good about themselves, and that we take our responsibility together.”
– Mariska, HRM advisor at Wilde Ganzen