In recent years, the mental ill-health of the employees has become a major health challenge in the workplace. Mental conditions such as depression, anxiety, and stress can have a negative effect on the productivity of an employee. These conditions are causing a loss of 72 million working days as per the research conducted by the Centre for Mental Health.
Both employees and employers are well aware of these facts. The question here is that has this awareness translated into action. Do both employers and employees are taking proper measures to resolve mental health problems faced by the employees at the workplace.
Now is the time for more action than awareness to get things in the right direction. Dissertation Help Online prepared three important steps that involve both employees and employers for action rather than the talk to take care of mental ill-health.
1. Importance of Line Manager Support:
Line manager support while an employee is suffering through mental ill health plays a pivotal role to get things settled. The more an employee feels comfortable in talking with his/her line manager, the better will be his/her mental health. This comfort level will help the employee to build a trustworthy relationship with his/her line.
Being supportive doesn’t mean we want the line manager to be a psychologist or a therapist. But a line manager must know about the health issues through which one of his/her team members is going. Organizations have to create an environment where employee and line manager both can feel comfortable to develop such relations. Sometimes the culture of an organization is such that there is always a hidden line between the relationship of staff and his/her line.
Before expecting a manager to look after his/her team members for mental ill-health at the workplace, organizations need to conduct proper training and awareness sessions for them. That will help line managers to understand how to handle such situations.
2. Lack of take-up of Interventions:
Encouraging employees to take up interventions at the workplace is another important aspect where both the employees and employers have to play a role in translating awareness into action for better mental health. Research (Britain’s healthiest workplace) shows that only 3 percent of the employees have approached the workplace health intervention.
That percentage is alarmingly low and needs to be increased. Most of the young people tend to avoid workplace health interventions and prefer to seek help from a private service, friends, family, or their GP.
To increase the percentage it is important to understand the availability of proper intervention services by the employer and trustworthy relationship between employee and employer.
An organization has to make sure that the availability of the interventions that can serve their employees in the best possible way. Once these interventions are available, the next step is to remind the employee constantly about availability and their importance. This method will no doubt encourage the employees to take up workplace intervention rather than going outside.
3. Prioritizing Staff well-being:
Setting the staff well-being as a priority by an organization is a step toward actions to take care of mental ill-health issues at the workplace. Let us have an understanding of what staff well-being means here.
Staff well-being in this context means that employees should know the purpose of what they are doing. The organizations need to keep their staff motivated towards the goal. Create an environment and culture in which every single person feels comfortable and has clarity of his/her role.
Japanese concept of “Ikigai” is a perfect example of this concept. Literal meaning of the word Ikigai is “the reason for being”.
All these small steps will spread the positive energy that will help staff to stay positive thus resulting in lower rates of mental ill-health.
Conclusion:
In nutshell, it is time for the employers to translate all the awareness they have on mental ill-health into actions and take steps that are necessary to reduce mental health problems at the workplace. It will to only benefit their business but also add values to social welfare.