Do businesses really care about your mental health?
COVID-19 has shone a much bigger, and long-overdue, light on mental health and its impact on our lives. These impacts inevitably include the workplace and what business can do to support their staff’s mental health.
So, do business really care about your mental health?
Well, if they don’t, they absolutely should. Why? Because as a responsible employer you should want to be proactively supporting your staff’s wellbeing, but also, if you don’t, it is highly likely to negatively affect your bottom line.
Mental health issues can have a significant effect on employee satisfaction and participation and is projected to become much more prominent in a post-Covid era. With major concerns about company survival for businesses at the start of the pandemic, its somewhat understandable that some have been slow to react to this issue.
But now, businesses must get to grips, and fast, with their understanding of the pressures and uncertainty that the recent pandemic has placed on their employees, particularly as they explore the opportunities and options involved with re-entering the workplace and bringing workers back.
How do we change for the better?
As I see it, there are 3 key factors that can contribute significantly to improving employee mental health:
1) Effective health and safety policies - that include active and specific employee support for mental health that is communicated and understood by the workforce;
2) Collaboration and team working – to have well managed and efficient organisational practices that support wellbeing in the workplace and empower employee’s to ‘have a voice’;
3) Clarity and Communication – that minimise any potential for uncertainty in the workplace; making sure tasks, expectations and corporate goals are clear; and that establish regular, straight forward and familiar communication channels for staff.
Some practical Steps
At, CPC we’ve taken some simple and practical steps to improve mental health awareness and support within our workplace including:
● Health Support Workshops
CPC ran mental health support workshops to increase understanding of mental wellbeing and its future prevalence and effect in the workplace, address existing stereotypes of mental illness, and investigate how to help serve coworkers.
● Online Yoga Sessions
The restrictions have put enormous pressure on people's physical and mental wellbeing, as gyms and yoga studios were forced to shut down. So, CPC took the initiative of turning to online yoga classes to help its employees regain balance and strength.
According to the National Institutes of Health, scientific evidence shows that yoga supports stress management, mental health, mindfulness, healthy eating, weight loss, and quality sleep.
Yoga brings a connection and good vibes, whether in a studio or through a computer screen.
Social Norms and continuing to adapt
As we start to ease out of lockdown, the changes to our ‘social norms’ are undoubtedly permanent.
Similarly, we will need to create new social norms within the workplace.
We can see that businesses such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are taking very different approaches to ways of working such as ‘flexible working’. It is clear that new ‘norms’ will vary between businesses, which in itself creates uncertainty for employees at businesses who have not made their plans clear.
Fundamentally, we need to make sure that mental health impacts and employee wellbeing is at the heart of our decision-making and business improvement. We must be continually analysing the gaps and shortcomings that our businesses have in supporting mental health and act quickly to resolve them.
If you are struggling with daily life, please get help. Talk to family, friends, work colleagues or organisations that specialise in mental health issues. CPC supports CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) who have a UK helpline that is open 365 a days a year from 5pm until midnight: 0800 58 58 58.