Zoe Sinclair was a successful BBC television producer at the height of her career, but when she returned to work after the birth of her first child, she experienced a severe lack of support. Juggling family life and her career was taking its toll, so when her department were offering voluntary redundancy, she decided enough was enough.
Spurred on by the stories and calls for help from other parents, Zoe left the BBC to establish one of the first organisations to advocate for better support for working mums and dad, turning herself to self-employment in search of flexibility – and she wasn’t alone. The number of women forced out of traditional employment was booming – between 2001 and 2016, female part-time self-employment almost doubled in the UK.
Employees Matter
As the years went on, organisations soon asked Zoe for more initiatives outside of the parenting sphere and that’s when Employees Matter was born. Its aim is to support staff with innovative seminars, webinars, workshops and education, as well as groundbreaking new research, to help promote and inspire a healthy and happy alliance between living and working. Uniquely, Employees Matter does not shy away from any topic, whether that’s addiction, grief, gender or fertility, believing that employees’ personal issues usually considered matters to be dealt with outside of work inevitably impact working lives – providing much-needed support to organisations on how to approach these.
This Can Happen
In 2017, driven by Zoe’s passion to help both employers and employees find solutions to create stigma-free, considerate work environments in which people can be open about their mental health, she co-founded This Can Happen. Its aim is to empower workplace mental wellbeing globally, through conferences, awards, research, webinars, seminars and bespoke programmes.
Originally a one-day mental health conference, This Can Happen now holds global events across three continents and has just completed its first mental health event for HR professionals in Singapore. It’s next UK-based conference will take place on 12 June 2025.
