Healthcare visits are stressful for just about everyone. For behavioral and mental health patients making an office visit, the anxiety is often worse. Creating calming and safe spaces for these patients is a specialty at Spec Furniture.
And its expertise in the area of behavioral and mental health spaces has led to an even more important focus for the Toronto-based furniture maker: on the mental health of its own employees.
Mental health is increasingly being recognized as an important issue, said Chris Benjamin, Spec Furniture’s general manager and chief operating officer, and that is driving more public and private funding to help support it.
“Increasingly, it is becoming more part of the general conversation,” he said. “We’re not just talking about mental health as a market that Spec sells into; we’re also talking about mental health as something that Spec looks at internally. That’s true of a lot of businesses, both at a large and small scale. You can see some of it coming up in education as well. Is there lots of work to be done? Absolutely. But there is increased attention and I think we can overcome the barriers that still remain. It is becoming a part of the normal conversation rather than being pushed into the background.”
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and it is important to note that about one in five adults experience some form of mental illness each year. A mental illness is a condition that affects a person’s thinking, feeling or mood. Such conditions may affect someone’s ability to relate to others and function each day. Each person will have different experiences, even people with the same diagnosis.
Mental and physical health are equally important components of overall health. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, depression increases the risk for many types of physical health problems, particularly long-lasting conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Similarly, the presence of chronic conditions can increase the risk for mental illness.
As the issue of mental health grew in society and among its customers, it also caused the company to think about how it could better serve its own employees. Mental health issues affect everyone, Benjamin said.
Fostering a sense of wellbeing among Spec employees not just helps them in terms of their personal lives, it also is helps connect them to the products that they are making. It makes the “why” behind the products clear.
“If you can get people to relate to that in their own personal way, you can also get them to relate to the product and it helps reinforce why we might do certain things,” he said. “‘Why is it putting in that tamper-resistant fastener is so important? Why is it important to design a product that doesn’t look so institutional?’ Mental illness can impact anybody. And so wellness and psychological safety is an important part of us being a good business for our employees and for our customers. That helps make the connection to the products that we’re making — these very real experiences that anybody could have.”
As an employer, Spec Furniture focuses on three areas: how it can improve the working environment and expectations to promote mental wellness in employees (for example, a four-day production work week, flex hours and opportunities for cross training); what it can do outisde of daily work expectations to foster positive mental health (like NETS training, disc & psychological safety work, social events, and work within the community); and what company benefits it can provide (such as group benefits, as well as things like parental leave and education funding).
Its approach to mental health also included some seemingly simple changes that made a big difference. The company introduced a four-day, 10-hour day work week for its production team. How does that promote mental health? Traffic in Toronto can be brutal and even short distance commutes can add hours to a typical work day. It gives employees a longer weekend and means one less day of traveling to and from the office.
Employees also have the chance to vote on different types of wellness training that the company provides. Volunteer work within the community is encouraged and supported. Spec brings in outside experts to talk to employees about things like meditation and nutrition. Counseling and sick days on top of vacation days are also part of the package. Spec tries to add a social element to the mix as well, which might include company barbecues or bowling.
Spec has also invested in providing external training on psychological safety to leaders and all employees. this training helps employees dive into their own personal stressors and triggers, and provides them with tools and ways to manage those triggers. This self-awareness training not only helps employees bring their whole selves to work, but creates more meaningful and productive collaboration between individuals.
Transparency is an important part of psychological wellbeing and Spec shares how it is doing as a business with employees. It is a holistic approach; a way to keep the team informed and engaged, which also helps workers gain a sense of value from their work.
Spec Furniture has been a manufacturer in the healthcare market since its founding and soon after, its customers began asking the company to tweak its products to work in mental and behavioral health settings, said Benjamin.
Spec Furniture has always worked hard to understand the needs of its customers and design products to fit their specifications. The company has a large collection of standard products for healthcare settings, but it also has expertise in creating special furniture for its customers. Its ability to respond to customer needs and adapt its products has led to its expertise in the mental and behavioral health space.
Furniture for mental and behavioral health spaces is specialized. The furniture for the sector tends to be more robust and with extra weight so the furniture cannot be picked off the ground. Extra welding on components make it more durable.
Specializing in behavioral health furniture was a natural evolution. It is now a focus for Spec Furniture. The company is designing new products from the ground up to be used in mental and behavioral healthcare spaces, while still understanding the unique nature of every project in the sector.
Benjamin said Spec Furniture built off the internal passion to serve the mental and behavioral healthcare sector not just as an extension of its successful healthcare furniture business, but as having separate needs from traditional healthcare products.
“We also built off our core skill sets around our ability to figure out how to make a product work for a specific customer need,” he said. “We talk a lot about needing to go beyond just what’s in the price book because every single one of these situations can be different. So you can’t just have a standard set of product and say, ‘Well, this is going to work for everybody.’”
Kevin Wright, regional sales manager at Spec, said designers have many more options than they had in the past when designing mental and behavioral healthcare spaces. Some products look institutional, which can cause anxiety in patients. Spec has options for the spaces that create more calming, comfortable and welcoming home-like environments while still meeting the safety needs of the products.
“It can get really easy for folks to get lost in making sure they’ve checked all the boxes from a function standpoint and losing sight of the form aspect,” he said. “We are all trying to move away from institutional settings and towards things that feel more comforting without losing sight of the aesthetic.”
Spec’s experience in the sector and its work internally makes it a valuable partner to its customers, and leads to in-depth conversations about mental heath. Its experience, both internally and with its customers, has made it a trusted partner.
“We’re privileged because we have a design team that is looking at and trying to determine the problem our customers might have that they don’t even know they’re going to have yet,” said Wright. “We try to bring out products that solve those problems.”