PLDT and Smart strengthen employees’ mental health and wellness during the pandemic

07/31/2021 12:00:35 PM

As its way to provide mental health support to its employees, PLDT and Smart launched their Mind Your Health program last year. 

With over 15 episodes published since its inception, Mind Your Health series of online talks that invite clinical experts and advocates to talk about various issues surrounding mental health, including the how-tos in dealing with mental illnesses and mental health advocacy campaigns. 

“At PLDT and Smart, one of the values we live by is ‘taking care of our people.' On top of offering vital medical services to employees including COVID-19 vaccines among others, we also want to alleviate their anxieties during this difficult time by providing them with mental wellness webinars as well as access to free professional counseling. These are all essential as self-care contributes to one's overall health and wellbeing,” said PLDT Group Chief People Officer Gina Ordoñez. 

This series has been watched over 7,000 times, including one of the recent episodes titled Managing Your Emotions’, which was a talk conducted by Riyan Portuguez—popularly known as ‘Your Millennial Psychologist’. With over 200,000 followers on social media, Portuguez is a longtime co-champion of PLDT and Smart when it comes to advocating for mental health. 

“Part of mental health is emotional well-being. One way to manage your emotion is to recognize what you feel,” Portuguez said. 

According to Portuguez, taking care of one’s mental health is a form of self-love – whether it is through setting boundaries or doing self-care. That's why Your Millenial Psychologist is reminding everyone that it is important to label one’s emotions so that one can have power over these feelings. It is only in recognizing and understanding our feelings and emotions that one can move forward.

Portuguez also shared how it is essential to be responsible for one’s feelings through emotion regulation. She underscored the importance of knowing the details of our feelings and emotions – where they’re coming from, the things or situations that may have triggered it, and finding the root or context of our emotions. 

Just like the muscles in our body, mental and emotional resilience is something that we exercise and develop. Portuguez cited how there are no bad emotions but there are ways to regulate them by finding the proper outlet to release them – be it through writing, journaling, or different ways of coping. This pandemic has clearly made people's emotions running high and an uncertain pace.

However, one of the key things to remember when it comes to managing emotions is to create a deep understanding on how much healing it takes to transform ourselves to be better. Healing, just like many other things in life, takes time. Even more so, it is important to know that healing isn’t linear.  

Aside from its talks series, PLDT and Smart also have online courses to help employees manage their mental well-being. These basically involve topics on de-stressing, meditation and movement, stress management; workplace positivity; and resilience amid unexpected change. In addition, PLDT and Smart also partnered with professional counselors, that employees can book appointments (online) and seek treatment and counseling.

PLDT and Smart’s Mind Your Health series reinforces the companies’ commitment to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), particularly UN SDG #3: Good Health and Well-Being. 

Author: slickmaster | © 2021 The SlickMaster's Files