Next week, 9^th – 15^th May, is Mental Health Awareness Week. This is a UK event supported by the Mental Health Foundation and aims to educate the public about mental health issues and to promote better mental health. We, at CEMEX, would like to play a part in this important area of staff health and wellbeing. Our focus this year is loneliness – how it can come in different forms and affect people in different ways.

We can all feel lonely at times. We can even feel lonely when we’re surrounded by others. In fact, millions of us hide our feelings of loneliness from friends and family. Mental Health Awareness Week aims to let everyone living in loneliness know, that by coming together, we can tackle loneliness and help prevent mental health problems.

We would like to encourage Supervisors and Managers to take some time out of their busy schedules to stop and have a chat with their colleagues over a cup of tea or coffee and see how they are outside of just the work environment.

For those of you that are still working from home, think about going through your contact lists and calling someone that you haven’t spoken to for a while, maybe someone that isn’t in your direct team (we all have those people we used to bump into at the coffee machine and catch up with).  We want you to feel safe talking about your mental health and encourage you to engage in open conversations. This will help create a positive culture in CEMEX, around mental wellbeing.