Honest talk on inclusivity and wellbeing, on both sides of the lanyard – A new column by Chantal Mendes, Head of Event Strategy, HeadBox
The first thing I noticed was how distant she was from the group. How isolated she had become. This summer I was at a Girlguiding camp, a charity I’ve volunteered as a leader with for over twenty years. Paddleboarding was one of many activities through the week, all designed to bring a sense of adventure and the belief that anything is possible.
But one of the young adults had decided, before she’d even put a foot on the board, that she couldn’t do it. She was scared of the open water. It was no bigger than a swimming pool, fifty metres of flat, calm water, but she stood back from the shore looking at it as though it were the open sea.
My instinct, honestly, was to encourage her. Come on, you’ll be brilliant, just get on. It’s what I’d have said on autopilot. But everything about her body language told me that was the wrong move: every cheerful push was just another voice telling her that her fear was the problem.
So I tried something different. I sat down next to her and asked what she was worried about. It wasn’t really the falling, she said. It was the darkness of the water, and how it seemed to close in around her. I told her that made sense, and that she didn’t have to get on the board today if she didn’t want to. We could just put our feet in. Then we took a step into the shallows and paused watching the other Girl Guides paddle, splash and get some relief from this summer’s heatwave. Then she decided, entirely by herself, to step in further so the water came to her knees. By the end of the session she’d joined her friends, she’d paddled out further than anyone had expected, and the whole thing was on her terms, at her pace.
I’ve thought about that session more than almost anything else this summer, because it’s the clearest picture of psychological safety I’ve ever seen. And it looks nothing like the way we usually talk about it.
The HR buzzword problem
Psychological safety has become one of those phrases that appears in a wellbeing policy and then quietly disappears. But strip away the jargon and it’s simple: it’s the belief that you can speak up, admit a mistake, ask for help or say “I’m not sure” without being punished, embarrassed or quietly written off.
Now think about what an event team looks like in the final week before the live day. Fixed deadline. Immovable client. Fifteen suppliers, three of whom have been aloof. The person who spots a risk in the run of show at 9pm faces exactly the same calculation as that young adult on the shore: if I say something, will it make me look like I can’t cope? Easier to stay quiet, push through and hope for the best.
That’s not just a wellbeing problem, it’s a delivery problem. The issues people don’t feel safe raising are the ones that surface on the day, in front of the client, when they’re hardest and most expensive to fix. In events, psychological safety is risk management.
The blind spot we rarely name
This month brings International Stress Awareness Week, and it overlaps with Movember. I want to use the second to say something specific about the first.
Around 70% of the event’s industry workforce are women, which means the people running the planning side of our industry look quite different from the people who physically build the room. Production, AV, rigging and set build are still heavily male, and those are the teams on the 5am load-in and the 2am get-out. The same banter and resilience that makes a crew brilliant in a crisis can make it almost impossible to say “I’m struggling” without it becoming a punchline, or a mark against you when the next job comes up. Many of these roles are freelance, which raises the stakes further: admitting you’re stretched can feel like admitting you’re unreliable.
The national picture shows why this matters. In 2024, 6,190 suicides were registered in England and Wales, and 4,599 of them were men: three in four. Men are about three times more likely than women to die by suicide. Yet in Mind’s 2024 survey, women were more likely to report symptoms of depression or anxiety than men, at 19% against 12%. Who says they’re struggling and who is actually struggling are not the same thing.
Our own corner of the world has its own warning signs. The 2021 Backstage Mental Health and Well-being Evaluation, from the ABTT and AAPTLE, found that 69% of respondents in theatre and live events were freelancers, and that poor mental health was significantly more prevalent among freelance staff. Put those two facts together and you have the people least likely to speak up and the people with the most to lose by doing so, often standing on the same loading bay.
Movember has done a remarkable job of getting men talking about mental health. The challenge for our industry is making sure that conversation doesn’t stop at a moustache photo on social media and actually reaches the loading bay at 5am.
What this looks like in practice
Psychological safety isn’t a poster or a policy. Taking my cue from that sandy shoreline, here’s where I’d start:
1. Ask what’s going on before you tell people what to do. Before a high-pressure build or show day, ask your team what red flags they have on the run of show. Not as a box-ticking exercise, but genuinely, and then listen to the answer without rushing to fix it or dismiss it.
2. Give people control over their own pace where you can. Deadlines are real and I’m not pretending otherwise. But within them there is almost always room for choice: who takes which task, when someone takes their break, how they’d like to be briefed. Autonomy is one of the cheapest forms of safety there is.
3. Reward the person who raises the problem early. If the colleague who flags a risk on Tuesday gets a sigh and the one who quietly absorbs it until Friday gets praised for being “easy”, you’ve taught your team which behaviour is safe. Say thank you out loud, and make sure the whole team hears it.
4. Make it normal for leaders, and the loudest voices in the room, to go first. Crew chiefs, production managers and senior planners set the temperature. When they say “I found that week tough,” it changes what everyone else is permitted to say. This matters especially for the men on the team who’ve learned that the strongest thing you can do is say nothing.
5. Build in the small steps. That young adult didn’t get on the board in one leap; she got there in stages, each one her choice. Not everyone will open up in a team debrief. Offer more than one route: a one-to-one, a quick message, a chat on the drive home.
Fifty metres is a long way when you’re scared
She made it to the end, by the way. And the thing I remember most isn’t the paddling. It’s that when she turned back to shore, she wasn’t looking for me to say well done. She was just smiling, because she’d done it herself.
That’s what I want for the people who deliver events. Not a team that’s been pushed harder, but one that has been trusted to set its own pace, to tell the truth about where it is, and to be met with a seat on the sand rather than a shove towards the water.
So, here’s my question for you: who on your team is standing at the water’s edge right now, convinced they’ll be judged for how far they think they have to go? And what would it take for you to sit down next to them?
If this piece has raised anything for you, Samaritans are available free, any time, on 116 123.