PERSONAL STORY: Skye Crawford, Founding Member

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Along with the stigma around talking about mental health in the workplace is the inherent fear people have of ‘saying the wrong thing’, giving people the building blocks for a conversation can be powerful.

Leading people & culture for AIA Australia, Skye is responsible for creating an employee experience that embodies the AIA promise of healthier, longer, better lives.

With a career focused on driving change in complex organisations, and in particular through large scale transactions, Skye has a passion for building sustainable businesses where people can thrive. Skye also has a strong commitment to coaching other leaders and executives so that they in turn positively impact the people and organisations they lead.

Skye holds an Executive MBA from Melbourne Business School, a Bachelor of Business (QUT) and is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Our mental health lens

Being a life and health insurer, our purpose at AIA Australia is to make a difference in people’s lives. We partner with our customers to help them live healthier, longer, better lives and we understand and value the importance of supporting people from a mental health perspective.

AIA has a number of initiatives that help Australians to understand their health and encourage them to take small steps towards a healthier life. These include our health and wellbeing program, AIA Vitality, our online platform, OneLife, and our partnerships with organisations such as mental wellbeing mobile app Mentemia.

Internally, we’ve developed a mental health framework that supports our people with their mental health and we encourage them to get involved in mental health initiatives across the organisation. We also empower our leaders to lead and support their teams. But importantly, we now put a mental health lens over each strategic and operational decision we make, so that we know that it’s not going to have an impact.

A future driving force

AIA joined Corporate Mental Health Alliance Australia because we share very similar visions and missions. But digging down a little bit deeper, our focus is to help people live healthier, longer, better lives. The workplace is just the start.

If we can help workplaces develop strategies that positively impact on people’s mental health, then obviously that’s going to have a flow-on effect on the community as well.

It makes sense for us as an organisation to participate in this type of alliance and help shape what could potentially be a driving force in the mental health space.

Skye Crawford

Founding Member, Corporate Mental Health Alliance Australia