The Railway Mental Health Charter Awards was founded earlier this year by the Rail Safety Standards Board (RSSB), to celebrate the 100th organisation to sign up to the Railway Mental Health Charter (RHMC).

The awards recognised some of the amazing mental health and wellbeing projects seen by the RHMC during the last year. The Best Frontline Initiative aimed to recognise companies that have developed initiatives to support frontline colleagues.

VolkerRail’s BROS initiative was launched last year, to help inform and encourage frontline employees to proactively engage with mental health conversations. The scheme encourages employees to react to situations at work in the same way they would in normal life, substituting work behaviours for personal behaviours and treating colleagues how they would family and friends. It also teaches operatives how to recognise changes to people’s behaviours, and build their own self-awareness.

Commenting on the award win, Vikky Goodwin, lead mental health champion for VolkerRail, and creator of the BROS initiative, said: “I am over the moon that VolkerRail has won this award and that BROS has been recognised as an initiative that is changing the negative, and sometimes taboo topic of mental health for site workers.

“Our operative’s travel, work and live together. If they can learn how to notice changes in behaviour, and how to approach conversations to better understand their colleagues, then it will make it a huge difference to everyone’s working environment.”

Since its launch, the BROS initiative has been successfully briefed to more than 80% of our business, resulting in an increase in mental health topic engagement and a decrease in mental health incidents. The initiative has also been praised across the industry, resulting in its adoption by other organisations.