What is your business doing to support your employee’s overall wellbeing that has been adversely affected by the recent events?
According to Mind UK, 54% of employers say they’d like to do more to help, even though they don’t have the right tools in place.
Traditional mental health care must be reviewed. Although therapists and healthcare professionals are a vital part of the solution, treatment cannot rely only on these specialists. Workplace healthcare should also involve smart self-diagnostics and tailored support, leading to more collaborative, work-based solutions that can be accessed by all.
We believe that there are 9 main steps that businesses should consider.
- Getting the board on board: Businesses must lead from the top and be prepared to invest.
- Open and honest dialogue: mental health is no longer a taboo topic and with the help of various tools employees can be assessed in secure spaces, given access to wellbeing solutions and feedback to management on progress.
- Leaders as mentors: leaders must be prepared to act as mentors and support and promote workplace wellbeing.
- Creating support networks: consider mentoring and buddying links, employee assistance helplines, wellbeing workshops and talks and/or employing an internal counsellor. Combined or as singular options, these could make a difference too.
- Communicating responsibly: sometimes communication overload can occur when implementing a new way of working so businesses should provide clarity, consistency and transparency when messaging. This includes a healthy attitude towards email too, don’t inundate people with information as this in itself can contribute to issues.
- A long, hard look at work-life balance: recent events have shown how agile and flexible businesses can be when responding to change, there is no reason why things have to go back to the “old ways” but again ensure communication with employees is two way so that their needs are being met.
- Bottom-up, employee-led approach: this will enable progression and learning, providing flexible opportunities for all – stop moving people around like chess pieces or developing only the elite few.
- Encouraging social interactions: as team dynamics is critical to happiness at work, perhaps make available a small budget for people to plan their own happiness, thus avoiding ‘enforced fun’. And in the meantime, get creative around optional virtual get-togethers too.
Be kind: this may seem obvious but in some instances is so often missing. In times of uncertainty and change kindness can go a long way. Be kind to each other and this will not only encourage greater wellbeing but also loyalty.
