How Rtone Supports Its Teams and Prevents Overcommitment

A business unit of the ABMI Group, Rtone is a product development studio. Its team, currently made up of 80 employees, supports clients across the entire value chain: research, design, industrialisation, production and maintenance of smart solutions. For several months, Rtone has been rolling out teale’s mental health solution to all employees and new joiners. We spoke to Malika Hassab, HR Manager, and Guillaume Nenna Ruhlmann, HR Project Manager, who explain the partnership and how it meets their needs in practical terms. 

Before teale: A Strong Company Culture with a Hidden Risk, Overcommitment

Since its beginnings, Rtone has had a very strong company culture. Values such as trust, transparency, autonomy and a flat structure are part of employees’ everyday experience.

“This culture, expressed for example through unrestricted remote working, has the positive consequence of creating strong engagement across the organisation. But there is another side to it that we did not necessarily anticipate: overcommitment,” explains Malika.

Managers began reporting cases of overwork and burnout.

The HR teams wanted to respond. How? By introducing coaching, training in active listening and monthly meetings with surveys to track how team morale changed over time.

“We even trained in Mental Health First Aid so that we could be more alert and act preventively,” says Malika.

The problem was that, despite these initiatives, overall fatigue remained, and some highly committed people even continued working while on sick leave.

“We felt that something was missing, and two observations emerged. First, we are not healthcare professionals, despite all our training and the goodwill we bring to it. Second, mental health touches something deeply personal, and teams may not always find it easy to talk about it with their employer. Even though we believe employers must do everything they can to help people feel well every day, there is also an external dimension that we cannot directly influence. Ultimately, the idea was that everyone should be able to take ownership of their own mental health and better understand their warning signs,” continues Malika.

It was in this context that Rtone decided to choose an external solution: teale’s holistic mental health solution.

With teale: Breaking the Taboo Around Mental Health

A Solution That Meets Their Overall Needs

Since January 2023, the HR teams have chosen to offer teale to their employees. The programme includes access to the platform for everyone, including future joiners, group workshops, some open to all and others reserved for managers, and six free sessions with a psychologist or coach of their choice.

“What mattered to us when choosing teale was that it should be more than just an app. We are also supported as HR professionals by mental health experts and a dedicated contact. That makes the difference when it comes to embedding mental well-being over time. We also quickly felt understood in our discussions about our challenges,” explains Malika.

Creating Squads to Involve Everyone and Make Mental Health a Genuine Habit

To implement the programme, Rtone’s HR teams launched a “squad”, a small group made up of HR staff and other employees interested in mental well-being. The squad’s objective is to contribute to internal communication, keep the topic alive and identify areas where group workshops could be useful.

“Making sure the topic is not taboo, explaining teale’s therapeutic approach, CBT, and above all showing how the app can be used in practice are our main objectives with this squad. We are convinced that for people to take responsibility for their mental health, we need to talk about it and make sure it is not something owned only by HR,” emphasises Guillaume.

In practical terms, the squad first used message templates prepared by teale to share information about the tool on an internal discussion channel, Slack. Over time, another channel was created: “teale”. Everyone interested in the project or the issues it addresses is gradually added to this channel, where the squad regularly publishes content. The aim of the “teale” channel is to identify interested employees without forcing people who are not yet interested to join.

“We are genuinely taking a choice-based approach: we show people the possibilities, and each person decides,” says Guillaume.

Practical Impact: A Very Encouraging Start

Key Figures: Convincing Results in Just a Few Months

With teale, the mental well-being pillar is becoming increasingly established at Rtone. 55% of employees have downloaded the app and already used it. Another encouraging figure is an average of 46 minutes per user spent with the various types of content available in the teale app, including the mental health index and expert videos on topics such as mental load, sleep and parenthood. As for the teale channel, 55% of employees are already members, demonstrating genuine internal enthusiasm for the topic.

The Positive Story

“Recently, we also saw people decide to meet during their lunch break in a meeting room to watch a webinar organised by teale, without anyone from our side suggesting it. It shows that people are becoming more comfortable talking and that teams are discussing the topic among themselves,” Guillaume tells us.

What Comes Next

Looking ahead, Malika and Guillaume emphasise that now the foundations are in place, the challenge will be to embed these habits over time. Continuing to communicate regularly, maintaining engagement levels on the app and developing group workshops in response to employees’ needs are the next priorities.

“By taking this long-term prevention approach, we will help our teams understand themselves better, become more self-aware and listen to their own needs,” concludes Malika.

At teale, we will do everything we can to help this continue!

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