The mental health app fine-tuning the way we communicate at work

At 38, Max Painter is older than most of his team at Unrival, the software company he co-founded to help businesses grow sales with data in 2011. Even since Unrival transitioned to remote working during lockdown, Painter has kept up his exuberant communications style, responding positively to ideas and initiatives floated by younger staff on Slack and sending emails full of grinning emojis. So when he gave an uncharacteristically short response to an idea one lunchtime on Slack, the two people who suggested it felt worried.

“I didn’t want to type on my keyboard because I was eating my lunch, so I typed, ‘OK, do it,’” Painter says. “But they felt this was really out of character, because normally every message has a smiley face. They were concerned that I had written something with no emojis and no context.”

For about an hour, the teammates debated what to do – did Painter really want them to go ahead with their idea? Was he OK? Then they remembered that they had just completed their “user manuals” with Spill, a mental health app, a kind of personality test that meant they had a guide to each of their colleagues’ communication styles. In Painter’s user manual, he said that if people had any concerns about him, they should be straightforward and just ask. Within minutes, Painter was able to explain that he really did like the idea – he was just busy at the time it was put to him. “Spill has provided us with avenues for how people want to be approached,” Painter says. “That’s really powerful.”

Spill was founded in 2018 by Calvin Benton and Gavin Dhesi to address what they saw as an access problem for mental health support. NHS waiting lists for psychological therapy vary from up to six weeks in some areas to 18 weeks at the extreme. To go private requires some knowledge of where to find a therapist and what kind of therapy to seek, as well as the disposable income to pay for it. “We wanted mental health support to be anonymous and bookable within a few clicks,” says Will Allen-Mersh, partner at Spill. The team also, crucially, wanted it to be free at the point of access – so they partnered with universities, workplaces and employers and used technology to connect therapy users to trained councillors remotely.

But the real brainwave came when Spill started to integrate with Slack. “There is so much work around promotion that needs to be done for people to find support through a website,” Allen-Mersh says. “Whereas as soon as we launched in Slack everyone could just put us inside the tool they use already, and it became easier to access.”

Spill now appears in the apps section of Slack for companies that use it, offering a menu of options including booking video therapy sessions, requesting access to a therapist and tools that might help someone change a habit or deal with anxiety, for example. Allen-Mersh says the most popular product is the “book a therapy” option, in which users can submit a question to a therapist. Rather than a Slack-like chat, the messages aren’t stored, and the response from the therapist isn’t instant. Instead it appears the following day and contains two or three paragraphs with some suggestions for what to do next.

Spill raised £650,000 on Seedcamp at the end of 2018 and now employs five people and 30 therapists, working with 1500 users across the world. But it is poised for rapid growth. The number of video sessions arranged by the platform increased fourfold in April compared to February or March. Allen-Mersh says Spill has received more interest from companies in March and April than in any of the previous months.

Around half of the UK workforce is estimated to be working from home on a continual basis during coronavirus, according to a survey of 1,000 firms by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development. However more than a third of employers in the same survey said that working from home has led to reduced mental wellbeing among staff.

Technology has allowed many companies to transition to home working while maintaining meetings and communication using Zoom, Slack and email. But these tools can also create problems with miscommunication, when messages are misinterpreted or misunderstood. Therapists told Spill that the problem has been more acute since the transition to home working, since so much is usually conveyed with body language. “Because communication is written, we need to be extra explicit in how we deliver it at the moment,” Allen-Mersh says.

The idea for the user manuals came through Spill Labs, a kind of research and development arm that gives existing Spill users the opportunity to try out new functions. “A lot of the frustration and anxiety we have with work is because we don’t know how to navigate relationships and not every company can afford expensive coaching or those Myers-Briggs [personality test] sessions offsite,” Allen-Mersh says. “If I’m being quiet one day, does that mean that I’m super stressed and to leave me alone, or would I prefer it if you check up on me? How do I prefer bad news delivered: on Slack or in person? We thought of it as low hanging fruit.”

Painter, who first heard about Spill when he hired employees from Monzo, the internet bank, says around 80 per cent of his staff have signed up to Spill since it became available. He says that offering people access to mental health support has helped the company start to address the issue more in the workplace, and facilitated more open conversations.”We have really seen a change that people feel brave enough to speak up about it,” he says.

“It’s important for us as an employer to do what we can to make sure our people are OK, because we have a duty of care for them 10 hours a day, five days a week. That’s even harder when you are not with them. Normally you can pick up the visuals, but when they are on Slack or Zoom it’s so much harder to read.”

One Friday at 4pm in May, Painter shared the link to the user manual survey with his staff. By 6pm they already had some results. “People found it really interesting not only as a way to find out about how to communicate with others, but also as a way to learn about yourself – like would you rather be friends with people at work, or keep it professional?”

Painter said he had a lightbulb moment when he swapped user manuals with someone he has worked with for almost three years and suddenly understood why they reacted in a certain way when he asked them a question: “It really shows that you can’t build a relationship with every single person in the same way – it’s almost like a cheat sheet into the way that someone is wired.”