Meet the Founder: Calvin from Spill
At Matchable, we put huge emphasis on team wellbeing. It is our belief that a healthy, happy team will have a knock-on positive effect for all of the impact organisations we work to support.
Spill is an online therapy platform, working to emphasise the importance of workplace wellbeing. We’re big fans at Matchable; their many tools have become a central part to our team's wellbeing, and we’ve loved seeing the way they approach mental health support in the workplace. We spoke to founder Calvin about his journey.
Hi Calvin, tell us a bit about your background and how that led you to start Spill.
I studied economics at university but spent all of my time outside my degree coding, so doing something with technology was a natural next step for me. My connection to therapy and mental health was more of a personal one. Both my parents are therapists so I’d grown up seeing single-handedly how positive an impact therapy can have on people’s lives. But once I entered work I also saw how inaccessible therapy was for most people.
The thing is, there were employee assistance programmes - which were counsellors you could arrange calls with - but the services were rarely used and the process of booking an appointment was cumbersome. It felt like these services were almost purposely designed to not be used. And in most companies, only 2% or less of employees were using EAPs, despite data showing that 1 in 4 of all adults now struggle with poor mental health. I just knew there had to be a better way.
If there’s one thing that technology (and software in particular) does really well, it’s disrupting industries and making them dramatically more accessible. We launched our Slack app at the beginning of 2020 and I’m happy to say we’ve already made therapy accessible to over 15,000 people.
How do you think the pandemic has affected mental health, particularly in the workplace?
This year has been undoubtedly turbulent for many people’s mental health. Aside from the worries and stresses that come with such a huge societal shift, trying (and often failing) to hold boundaries between our work and personal lives has put a strain on many people’s mental health.
Earlier this year, we surveyed office workers about how the pandemic has impacted their mental health. 79% of workers said they felt close to burnout this year. And it’s understandable. Without being able to have clear divides between work and personal life, people told us they are working later than usual and not taking as much annual leave as in a normal year. This is something we’ve been talking a lot about through the Spill Holiday Campaign.
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been using these insights to build an all-in-one mental health support product that fits to the changing needs of remote workers. For example, as well as being able to book therapy sessions in less than a week, we’ve been holding virtual workshops on topics like imposter syndrome, improving communications in line management, and anxiety.
How do you think the mental health landscape has changed over the past few years?
Over the past decade, mental health in the workplace has been spoken about much more thanks to celebrity ambassadors and campaigns dedicated to challenging the stigma surrounding it. But there’s still a long way to go. With increasing rates of burnout in the workplace and recent reports of toxic work cultures, there are increasing pressures that come with ‘always-on’ high-growth companies.
What are the biggest challenges facing you and the Spill team right now?
The challenge for us at Spill is convincing businesses that mental health support is not just a ‘nice to have’, but that it’s essential. Workplaces that actively create an environment with psychological safety in mind are more likely to be successful. Google researchers found that teams at Google who fostered psychological safety were less likely to leave Google, more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, more likely to increase revenue and were rated twice as effective by executives.
Reassuringly, there’s a lot of progressive companies out there who are on the front-foot of fostering work cultures which value the psychological safety of their staff. We’ve onboarded over 200 startups and scaleups in the past year alone (including Matchable!).
The Spill team
As a company so focused on employee wellbeing for others, there must be lots you do internally to keep your team happy and healthy. What are some ways that Spill approaches this?
We do a number of things to ensure our team’s psychological wellbeing. Much of it starts in our working practice.
We promote open and honest feedback: We hold regular team meetings which allow the team to openly share and give constructive feedback to everyone’s work.
We make sure everyone is rested: We measure holidays as a KPI to ensure everyone is taking enough time and we make sure that when we take time off we include this in our OOO.
We go away for company trips together to build personal relationships. Something which we see as essential to feel fulfilled at work.
And of course, everyone at Spill has access to our therapist whenever they need to talk.
What do you hope to see from the future of Spill?
We’re on a mission to rid the world of unnecessary emotional pain and making therapy accessible at work is a huge step towards that mission. Over the past year, we’ve made therapy accessible to 15,000 people via their workplaces. Of those people, 53% had never accessed therapy before. And we’ve done that with a small team of just 16 people. We now know our model works, so the team is focused on scaling our service, launching new features and making Spill accessible to as many people as possible.
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