Mental health is a subject that even now, still requires a lot more effort and work in order to be properly overcome. Employers need to not only have an awareness on the subject but also the will to break the taboo. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has in fact outlined that a robust and inclusive workplace greatly improves mental health of employees and that discrimination, inequality, excessive workloads, low job control and job insecurity pose a serious risk to mental health.
In 2019, 15% of working adults were estimated to have ben suffering with low mental health with numbers largely to have spiked up during these last two years of the pandemic. Studies have shown that more than 80% of workers report at least one factor at their workplace that may negatively impact their mental health. If not properly managed, mental health issues can be detrimental to your teams performance and productivity. Now, you guessed it, one major barrier hindering progress in the workplace is overcoming the unwillingness to talk about mental health issues because of the negative association with self-esteem, failure, weakness or work transfers.
So what can you as an employer do? It all starts with prevention, ensuring that through HR a more proactive approach is taken to really spend quality time with employees, understanding where they are within themselves and helping them navigate the internal dynamics, removing obstacles and barriers but also helping them to gain the tools they need to overcome.
This coupled with a culture change from the negative associations with mental health issues with the creation of an enabling environment, story sharing, free and anonymous psychological sessions and team building that is focused on emotional connections are all key facets for such a change as well as giving employees the ability to better manage their lives with with work, such as sustainable ways of working that may also include remote work.
Though mental health has always been an underlaying problem, the pandemic certainly brought this much more to the surface, and with that, it is now all our responsibility to evolve our day to day in order to meet this head-on and champion the change our employees and businesses need.
