The pandemic has highlighted, in its intense stresses, the importance of mental fitness, and the responsibilities that companies have to make sure that their team is doing alright during difficult times. However, if you’re a small or growing company, you might have never really considered the actions you can take to improve employee mental well-being. You might even consider it outside the capabilities of your company to handle.
However, you don’t need to be a major corporation with a giant HR department in order to get invested in employee wellness. With a little awareness, you can take steps today to improve employee mental fitness at your company.
Mental wellness is just as important as physical wellness. Most companies care if their employees are physically sick. So why not extend that care to employee mental health as well? Even if you don’t think it’s your responsibility to take care of employee wellness, a lack of mental fitness at your company is going to affect everyone. A vast majority of employees who suffer from poor mental health report that this has a direct impact on their work quality.
More pressingly, a common source of stress for employees is often their workplace and its culture. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that team leaders are to blame for degradation in employee wellness, it does mean that they are the ones most responsible for tackling mental fitness issues.
Company cultures can often be competitive and demanding, which can be a major factor in burnout and stress in team members. However, that was before we entered the era of pandemics, remote work, and the pressure to always be online and available. Lack of mental fitness is a growing issue in North America, and trends to reduce stigma about discussing it are often sluggish.
If your team has moved to full remote work, maintaining employee wellness programs can seem like an impossible task. It can be difficult to encourage employees to understand the health benefits of mental fitness. And trying to actually organize programs to promote employee wellness can be incredibly difficult.
So is there anything you can do to help promote employee mental wellness even if employees aren’t coming into the office? It might be difficult, but there are a few easy first steps you can take to promote employee wellness.
One of the easiest steps is to simply talk about it. One of the most healthy behaviors you can promote is being open about sensitive topics such as mental illness. You may have many more employees wanting to discuss such topics than you realize, who are only being held back by worries of how they will be perceived. By making it normal to talk about employee wellness at your company, you encourage people to come forward with their own concerns.
If employees are stuck inside, there is going to be the temptation for them to let their physical health lapse. There are ways you can try to promote better physical health remotely, however. One of the best ways to do this is to host fun virtual events for your employees with a focus on physical wellness. This could include cooking classes with a focus on healthy eating, and online aerobics or yoga sessions.
Lastly, it’s important that you take care of your own mental fitness and the mental wellness of team leaders. While there are ways that you can help, it’s also important to understand that your team leaders aren’t therapists or dedicated mental wellness coaches. There is only so much they can do on their own. Thankfully, Liberate is here to help out with our employee wellness programs – don’t worry so much about employee stress that you stress yourself out!
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