New Year, New Focus: Supporting Employee Mental Health
New Year, New Focus: Supporting Employee Mental Health
The start of a new year often brings with it a wave of resolutions – promises to improve ourselves and our lives. For employers, a key resolution should be to prioritize the mental health of their employees.
The past few years have underscored the critical link between employee well-being and overall organizational success. A mentally healthy workforce is more productive, engaged, and innovative.
Why Is Employee Wellbeing Important?
Companies that prioritize investing in their employees see higher engagement, leading to reduced absenteeism, lower turnover rates, improved customer satisfaction, and increased profitability. Factors that harm employee engagement include burnout, toxic workplace culture, ineffective management practices, inadequate benefits, poor work-life balance, and limited growth opportunities.
Leadership style, often influenced by corporate culture, plays a critical role in employee well-being. Managers who disregard personal and work-related challenges, impose unreasonable demands, and fail to actively listen or collaborate with their teams can gradually diminish employee morale, resulting in burnout, disengagement, and declining well-being.
How can a manager support employees’ mental health?
For organizations, supporting employee well-being begins with training management to be thoughtful and compassionate leaders. Here are five ways managers can improve employee well-being:
1. Support Open Communication About Mental Health
We have come a long way from the time when mental health issues were ignored or even ridiculed. With anxiety and depression at an all-time high, especially in younger workers, it’s important to acknowledge mental health concerns and build a corporate culture where employee mental health is prioritized.
Managers should keep the lines of communication open with their employees and ask if there is anything that is causing them stress or leading to feelings of burnout.
2. Shift Perspectives on Performance Reviews
Performance reviews can be stressful for employees, especially if they aren’t meeting regularly with their managers to discuss performance throughout the year. Without regular feedback, the annual review process can be daunting.
Managers can make performance reviews less intimidating by building in regular checkpoints, ensuring they give praise when it’s warranted. They can also learn tricks to rephrase negative feedback into something that will help employees grow.
3. Welcome Feedback
There is often a disconnect between what managers think their employees need versus what employees actually need. To close that gap, managers simply should ask employees what they need, then follow up with the suggestions.
Whether it is having weekly check-in meetings, sending an email, or asking employees to complete a survey, employees should be encouraged to share all of their feedback, including negative feedback.
Once feedback is received, the employer should take the feedback into consideration, and be transparent about what is — and what is not — possible.
4. Build a Positive Leadership Style
Everyone has a favorite manager or leader, which could include teachers, mentors, and managers from other departments. Managers should tap into their network to learn management tips from people they admire.
Schedule lunch or coffee with that person to talk about their management style and how they handle employee wellness. Take their advice to develop your own positive leadership style.
5. Take a Course to Develop Management Skills
Many leaders strengthen their management skills by taking management courses. These courses not only teach the fundamentals of business management, including understanding market dynamics and designing and executing business strategy, but they also help managers learn skills to support and lead employees.
Courses can help managers navigate leadership transitions, improve their ability to influence change across the organization and shape corporate culture.
How can I look after my mental health at work?
We can all take steps to improve our own mental health, and build our resilience – our ability to cope with adversity.
Self-care is a skill that needs to be practiced. It isn’t easy especially if we feel anxious, depressed or low in self-esteem.
Here are ways you can improve your mental health at work:
1. Talk about your feelings
Talking about your feelings can help you maintain your mental health and deal with times when you feel troubled.
It can be hard to talk about feelings at work. If you have colleagues you can talk to, or a manager who asks how you are at supervision sessions, it can really help. Identify someone you feel comfortable with and who will be supportive.
If you don’t feel able to talk about feelings at work, make sure there’s someone you can discuss work pressures with – partners, friends, and family can all be a sounding board.
2. Focus on your strengths
Rather than focusing on your weaknesses, concentrate on being more of who you already are. Capitalize on your strengths and seek out projects that give you satisfaction. Because when we use our strengths, the activity feels natural to us, and we are more likely to experience accomplishment.
3. Start a gratitude culture
Studies of gratitude at work link it to less stress, fewer sick days, and higher satisfaction with our jobs and coworkers. One way to start a gratitude practice is by writing down one thing that went well that day and why. Another idea is simply writing a note (or email) to someone you are grateful for. You can even start your team meetings by going around the room and having each person share one thing they are thankful for.
4. Manage your relationships
Relationships are key to our mental health. Working in a supportive team is hugely important for our mental health at work.
We don’t always have a choice about who we work with, and if we don’t get on with managers, colleagues or clients, it can create tension. It may be that you need to practice more self-care at these times, but you may also need to address difficulties.
Work politics can be a real challenge when we have mental health problems. It can be helpful to find a mentor or a small group of trusted colleagues with whom you can discuss feelings about work – to sense check and help you work through challenges.
Try and make sure you maintain your friendships and family relationships even when work is intense – a work-life balance is important.
5. Accept rather than judge feelings
Fluctuating emotions are part of life. But what causes us angst isn’t the emotion itself. It’s the judgment of the emotion. When we feel fear, sadness or shame, our first reaction is to reject that feeling. Instead, accept them. That simply means being aware of your emotions and accepting them for what they are right now, knowing that they won’t last.
6. Learn something new
Many times, we feel depressed or anxious when we are unchallenged. That’s why learning new skills can improve your mental health at work. By learning something new, you build a sense of purpose, raise self-esteem, and boost self-confidence. Some things you could try include signing up for a course, getting certified in a new skill, or shadowing a senior staff member.
7. Ask for help
None of us are superhuman. We are all sometimes overwhelmed by how we feel or when things don’t go to plan.
Your employer may have an Employee Assistance Programme. These services are confidential and can be accessed free and without work finding out. You may also be able to access occupational health support through your line manager or HR service.
The first port of call in the health service is your GP. Your GP may suggest ways that you or your family can help you, or they may refer you to a specialist or another part of the health service.
