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Estate agency brings in mental health expert to support staff during Covid

Nine-branch James Pendleton has been running the scheme for six months and says improvement in personal and team morale has been amazing.

Nigel Lewis

estate agent zoom mental health

An estate agency boss in London has revealed the unusual mental health programme he has adopted to help staff within his nine-branch agency get through the ‘super strange times’ of the pandemic both at home and work.

This follows a recent column by Propertymark CEO Nathan Emerson, who told his story of helping an agency client who had been cracking under the strain of running split ‘bubble’ teams remotely and had been suffering in silence.

joy gowerLee Pendleton says his company, London agency James Pendleton, has been working with an Neuro Linguistic Programme or NLP life coach called Joy Gower (pictured) for the past six months to help get his teams avoid this kind of meltdown and generally improve the mental health and lives.

“She’s been helping the teams in a variety of ways including mental health, emotional well-being and the practicalities of dealing with the pandemic-driven life and work styles they’re coping with at the moment,” says Lee (pictured, below).

“Each of the four groups get 30 minutes sessions on Zoom or Teams together each week and I’ve seen some hugely positive results from these including improvement in their mental outlook to the pandemic, that they are sleeping better, eat better.”

“Our experience is that people come out of their shells a bit, which normally is difficult to achieve in a busy and pressured sales environment like estate agency – many people are reluctant to open up in front of colleagues in the flesh, but somehow it’s easier virtually.”

He says the scheme, which also includes confidential one-to-one sessions if requested, it is going to be embedded in the company permanently rather than just being a Covid-related scheme.

“Also, we’ve got around a third of staff working from home so it also helps them feel that they’re not isolated from the branch teams.”

Read Nathan Emerson’s latest blog.

March 5, 2021

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