Mental Health in the Workplace (Eco Week)

November 23rd 2023

As part of Eco Week, we were delighted to welcome Amy Browne of CCLA to come talk to us about her stewardship role in the sustainability team.

CCLA is a leading charity asset manager that invests responsibly and ethically for clients, including charities, churches, local authorities and professional investors. Alleyn’s began collaborating with CCLA about five years ago after a tender process that included input from students. Their expressed desire was for Alleyn’s to partner with a company dedicated to making a positive impact in sustainability. The income that CCLA generates through its investments goes towards paying for scholarships at Alleyn’s. In 2022-23 specifically, the Senior School awarded 107 means-tested bursaries to pupils; of over 60 are fully funded meaning that families do not pay anything towards the fees.

One of the areas that Amy’s work focusses on aims to compel companies to formalise an approach to mental health in the workplace, as it has been proven that creating a positive environment for mental health costs a lot less than failing to do so (i.e. staff absences). Over two years, Amy and her colleagues mapped all the mental health frameworks they could find to build a set of assessment criteria. They then assessed and ranked more than 200 of the world’s largest listed companies and published two benchmarks:

The UK 100 Benchmark (largest UK listed companies with more than 10,000 employees)
The Global 100 Benchmark (largest listed companies in the world with more than 10,000 employees)

Depending on their position in the league table, companies were incentivised to improve their approach to mental health in the workplace.

To convince companies to respond to their recommendations, CCLA has built a global investor coalition on workplace mental health. So far, 52 investors have become part of this coalition, representing in aggregate US$9 trillion in assets under management.

Thank you very much Amy for giving us such a fascinating talk on how to improve mental health in the workplace.

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