Your people are your superpower

A sit down with Anna, VP of Operations at Spill

A great business is only as good as its people. They can be your superpower, and so when their mental health takes a turn, the repercussions can be massive. Around 17 million working days are lost every year globally because of ill-health caused by work stress, depression, or anxiety.

That’s over 50% of all work-related ill health cases. When you put it like that, it’s no surprise that mental health is high on the agenda of most HR departments and people teams. But helping individuals with their unique challenges can be time-consuming, and often, managers may not be the most qualified person to talk to when it comes to anxiety, grief, or a relationship breakdown that’s affecting their mental health and performance at work.

That’s where Spill comes in. A technology provider that offers high-quality counselling packages, tailored by business owners and people managers for their teams, and accessed through a tech platform where qualified, fully-vetted therapists are waiting to help. We spoke to Anna Turner-Major, VP of Operations at Spill over at their Canvas office on Shoreditch High Street, to understand more about the business, ask whether they practise what they preach, and if selecting the right office space for your business can play a part in shaping work culture.

Hey Anna, thanks for having us over here. Can you tell us a bit more about Spill and what you do for your clients?

Spill is a product that helps directors, founders, HR, and their People teams support their employees' mental health, with our main focus on providing therapy. We care deeply about quality of therapy and so we have a 5-stage hiring process for all our therapists. Once the employer then installs Spill, employees can access therapy with vetted professionals on the Spill platform for free.

So something super relevant in today's world.

Yeah, for sure. The businesses we work with aren’t trying to do a box-ticking exercise. They’re looking to offer their teams something that actually works because they care about their employees. We’ve noticed this even more over the last two years as things have become tougher for businesses and funding for benefits in general has decreased. As a result, businesses have cut anything that’s not being actively used by employees and are looking for value from the services they continue to provide.

And how do you deliver those services?

Customers can create a package for their employees online, either at the team level or on an individual basis. For example, they might offer each member of the team four sessions a year on Spill. The team can then onboard and get started straight away. The shortest amount of time we’ve seen from signing up to an employee booking a session is 7 minutes.

Businesses often come to us because their EAPs (employee assistance programmes) are ultimately inaccessible and sometimes even turn employees away, so ease of access has been a focus for Spill since we started.

How’s the landscape changed from when you started back in 2018?

We were a message-based product for about two years, then in 2020 the product pivoted to talking therapy and started offering video therapy sessions. At the time, there was a tailwind from the pandemic and we saw HR teams getting a clear mandate from their businesses to support employees however they could - and getting budget to do that. Then in the last year or two, we've seen budgets being tightened again and HR teams looking for something more targeted again to make budgets go further.

We've therefore continued to focus on the most impactful kinds of support. That means less time on things like workshops and webinars and more time on ease of access to quality counselling that we have seen to be most impactful way to support employees.

Have you brought these services to your own team?

Yes. Having Spill there as a resource for us to turn to when we feel out of our depth is fantastic. I’m the person who looks after HR at Spill and it's great to have Spill there when I feel like someone can benefit from talking to a mental health professional.

Whenever someone tells me they’ve booked a session it’s such a weight off my mind because I know they’re going to speak to an expert who can provide the professional support they need.

So you’re looking after employee wellbeing as part of your role. Can you tell us more about your role and what you’ve been up to in the last 12-18 months?

When you’re a small team, everyone’s role is very broad. In my role I look after people, finance, legal, and I work on the product. That means talking to customers and prospects and then working with design and engineering to build new features that will improve the product.

In terms of what we’ve worked on over the last 6 months, we’ve focused on building out support for employees going through a life event. If you have someone on the team experiencing a bereavement or having a child they’re going to need quite different support to other members of the team. We’ve been building specialised support packages for these cases.

Being mindful of tighter budgets, we’ve also launched more cost-effective plan options recently including paying for therapy sessions on a pay-as-you-go basis and buying discounted bundles of sessions. We took inspiration from the kinds of plan options you get when you’re buying a phone contract.

Looking at your values, I noticed ‘Bring everyone along’ is one of them. Can you tell me a bit more about that as there are some strong synergies here with our values at Canvas.

Values are interesting because they’re always evolving. We did our values exercise around 2 years ago when we were a bigger team and spent a lot more time context sharing. There’s now only 8 full-time employees at Spill and most people are in all the same meetings so context sharing became a lot easier.

That said, we do two days in the office every week and that’s because there’s so much context you don’t realise you’re sharing with each other until you’re remote. When you’re remote you miss things like someone being visibly excited after a demo because the new pricing landed or someone mentioning offhand that a customer has requested a new feature. In that sense, having an office with Canvas has been really important for the team.

How important is it to you and the team to have a space that feels like home?

We've been with Canvas for a while now and when we were looking for a bigger space we did look at a whole bunch of different spaces around this area. We were looking for somewhere that was more accessible especially because we moved to two days a week in the office. Canvas was by far and away the best space we looked at. The other spaces were impersonal. White desks, white walls. You had to pay to get a meeting room, that kind of thing.

One of the weird litmus tests was ‘Can you open the windows?’ That somehow makes it feel like you have more control over the space you’re in.

How have you found the Canvas team, have you had much interaction?

When we were moving in it was really, really easy. All of our stuff got moved over for us from our other Canvas office and the post got auto-forwarded without us having to do anything which has been amazing. All those little things have made life easier.

Whenever we've had a question it feels very personal. For example, we didn't have a key to our postbox and someone came around with one on the same day which was great.

Can you tell us what's on the horizon for Spill?

We’re trying to work with customers in new industries. We started Spill working with a lot of tech companies and creative agencies. We’ve been doing research with smaller businesses in other industries and tweaking our features and pricing as a result. Last month, our fifth school signed up to Spill so it’s starting to work. But there’s still a lot of businesses out there that don’t have Spill. So lots more work to do.

We don’t talk about ‘community’ as it’s a bit overused but we do believe in ‘building connections, and although we don’t major on events for our clients as we know everyone is busy running their businesses, we will make sure there are opportunities for businesses to connect. You can also connect through our client portal and Spill sounds like something other Canvas clients could really benefit from.

Yes! We do have a couple of clients already in the building and across the street but it would be great to do a talk and make sure people know we’re here, so if they or someone on their team is going through something we can help.

What would be your standout moment so far for you personally at Spill?

There’s been loads of great moments. Most recently, we hit profitability last month. We looked at the balance sheet and were thinking ‘oh my god is this right?’ It’s been the culmination of some really hard work so it was great to see it paying off.

And of course whenever you get feedback from customers on the product it’s always really genuine feedback. We work with fantastic therapists and often people will say, ‘this session has changed my life’. That’s not one standout moment, but every time that happens it feels really good.

And what do you think businesses could learn from Spill?

Work with professionals. We have an excellent data protection officer and I’m so glad we didn’t try and build that capability in-house. You can try and solve something yourself but ultimately it will take a lot of your managers’ time, it’s stressful for them because they’re often out of their depth and they are unlikely to be the best placed to give advice. So looking outside your business and thinking how can I work with a professional to solve – that’s something I'd encourage businesses to do.

I’ve got some quick-fire fun questions for you now!

What would be your superpower and why?

Stretching time. Like, every hour would last twice as long. That would be amazing.

If you could listen to one track on repeat what would it be?

That's tricky. I've recently got really into salsa music. I’ll send you a salsa song that I think would be the one.

Is it just the music or are you doing a bit of salsa dancing as well?

Not yet but it feels inevitable.

Tell us one thing that you've got on your bucket list.

Seeing the Northern Lights. I missed them when we had them in the UK!

And going back to the music theme what would be your go-to karaoke song?

American Boy by Estelle and Kanye West.

We understand that a business is only as strong as its people. So by ensuring the day-to-day is taken care of in a space that’s personalised to you, we help clients feel their best in a place that feels like home. And when you feel great, you’re more productive and at most creative. If you want to feel more in control of your space and work with an office provider who cares, come and talk to us.