Speaking at the Diversity and Inclusivity Finance Forum (DIFF), Devika Wood, founder of women’s health collective I am Arla, said it was crucial to have a “practical implementation of solutions that we can do to help women on a daily basis”.
“What we do is we try to support organisations around co-designing mental health policies that are inclusive. We review existing HR and wellbeing programmes to try and inform gaps in gender responsiveness, and one of the things where we’ve seen absolutely incredible outcomes is workshops and safe space programming,” she said.
The structure that I am Arla uses to create safe spaces is the SAFE Framework, which stands for ‘See Her’, ‘Actively Listen’, ‘Formalise Support’ and ‘Embody Change’.
Wood said this offers a “practical, human-centred roadmap for organisations to follow, moving beyond token gestures to build sustainable, psychologically safe environments for women”.
On the first point, ‘See Her’, the goal is to “make the unseen visible”, so to “identify and acknowledge the lived realities of women in the workplace”.
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Key actions in this pillar include:
- Story mapping workshops: Invite women employees to anonymously share lived experiences around safety, bias, stress, and empowerment.
- Intersectional data collection: Conduct listening surveys with identity-based segmentation (e.g. race, motherhood, LGBTQ+ status, etc).
- Environmental audits: Assess physical and digital spaces for gendered stressors or safety barriers (e.g., privacy, Slack channels, toilets).
- Innovation: Launch an internal ‘See Her’ zine or intranet wall to celebrate women’s unseen labour, wins, and voices.
Under ‘Actively Listen’, the goal is to “build cultures of validation, empathy, and response – not just performative listening”.
Key actions include:
- Monthly safe space circles: Facilitated spaces for women to reflect, connect, and decompress in psychologically safe conditions.
- ‘Office hours with leadership’: Create structured, non-hierarchical listening spaces between female staff and executives.
- Peer-led support pods: Organise voluntary groups by theme (e.g., new motherhood, women of colour, perimenopause, etc) with discussion guides.
- Innovation: Introduce ‘compassion minutes’ at the beginning of team meetings – a minute of sharing or silence to normalise check-ins.
On the ‘Formalise Support’ point, the aim is to “integrate mental health and safety into the actual infrastructure of the organisation”.
Key actions cover:
- Designated safe space rooms: Quiet, sensory-friendly rooms for emotional regulation, privacy, pumping, or rest.
- HR policies: Maternal health, domestic abuse, distress, harassment, or burnout.
- Crisis escalation plans: Mental health escalation trees that don’t rely solely on line managers.
- Innovation: Embed ‘pause buttons’ into workflows, a normalised, supported way for women to take micro-breaks (via Slack emoji, calendar block, etc.).
- Create a digital ‘mental health passport’ for employees to flag preferred support approaches confidentially.
Finally, the ‘Embody Change’ pillar aims to “transform safety from a policy to a lived reality through accountability, modelling, and ritual”.
Key actions include:
- Safe leadership labs: Train leadership in relational safety, emotional literacy, and repair culture.
- Annual ‘Healing in the Workplace’ week: A dedicated cultural reset with talks, workshops, and rest.
- Internal allyship scorecards: Co-developed with women staff to track meaningful behaviours from peers and leaders.
- Public commitment boards: Recognising and talking about topics that are taboo and needed.
- Innovation: Workshops and days to invite conversations around women’s health and mental health.
