Designing for Great Mental Health

Date Posted:Tue, 5th Mar 2024

When you walk into Roar Design’s (very cool of course) studio in Alserkal Avenue, you immediately feel their highly creative, very busy vibe. There is an exciting energy but also a friendly, homey feel – enhanced by the presence of some truly adorable dogs, who come to work with some of the team members. Roar Design, Pallavi Dean & her amazing team of super talents, have won many awards for their innovative interior architectural work. Pallavi, not that she will tell you this, was Architectural Digest’s Middle East Designer of the year in 2020 & was their Global Designer of the Year in 2021. She & Kathryn Athreya, Roar’s MD, have built an incredible business. But what is perhaps most impressive is their serious commitment to supporting the mental & emotional health of their team. This is something that is so often just paid lip service, especially when a firm is so busy & already achieving commercial success.

In our highly competitive & fast paced business environment in Dubai, staying mindful & thriving even when stressed is not the easiest task. That’s why it was so impressive when, in October 2023, Roar took home a new kind of award – Best Mental Health Care in the Creative Industries, at the Mentl Awards. This was also an awesome piece of news for our psychology & coaching team at The Free Spirit Collective (FSC) because we have been on this journey with them since 2018.

I started working with Roar when they were based in the Dubai Design District. As the team grew & they made their move into their studio in Alserkal, it coincided with us expanding our team & opening our centre in City Walk - designed, of course, by Roar. Working with the Roar team has been amazing because they allowed us to do what we rarely get to do – design & implement a comprehensive, ongoing mental & emotional health intervention. As mental health professionals we often experience frustration regarding our impact on organisations. This is because we are often brought in only once per quarter, or even only because of a stressful workplace incident. The ‘broaden & build’ work we have been able to do at Roar has been very satisfying. Pallavi says: ‘Mental health & wellness in ingrained in Roar’s cultural values & we’ve been working with Briar for over five years to build a solid foundation. In a consultancy setting, our most valuable asset is our people & FSC has an evidence-based approach to assessing, recording & evaluating the needs of the team & responding with bespoke workshops. We are very excited about our first off-site retreat this year & continuing with one to one sessions, group workshops & leadership training. It has been a game changer for our organisation’.

The time & access afforded us at Roar has really allowed us to show how psychology can be used in the pragmatic & tailored ways that can lead to real change. From mindfulness to psychological first aid training; from burnout prevention & stress management tools to enhancing creativity & managing difficult discussions with clients, we have been able to regularly focus on a variety of pertinent mental health themes to bring awareness to wellbeing & how to maintain it in daily busy life.

When working with a company, the target is always on skill building to an extent, but perhaps of even greater importance is to help companies build & maintain a work culture that attends to the psychological waters the team is swimming in – to create & sustain an emotionally intelligent workplace. Through working with the Roar team every two weeks, designing the trainings by surveying the team & selecting the appropriate inputs from psychologists, psychiatrists & coaches, we were able to really support them to make discernible positive shifts.

Our team has since expanded again & so we are looking forward to even more diversity in our trainings with Roar this year. As well as us supporting them, we have also learnt a lot from them about design thinking & we now apply it to all our corporate work. If you would like to find out more about partnering with FSC to enhance your team wellbeing culture, just let us know. We have coffee waiting for you at our lovely centre in City Walk. First step is to find out who you are, what you want to create & what problems you are trying to solve. From there, we will iterate with you until together we come up with the bespoke interventions that will best impact your team.