Originally published in Forbes.com
As leaders, your team’s well-being and your own should come first above every other measure, especially in times of crisis. There is no way to achieve it, but you must explore what works best in your company. Corporate well-being and mental health support are no longer fancy perks but must-haves.
You can take two directions in times of crisis: fear and victimization or self-actualization and engagement. How you manage mental health will help you walk through the latter.
A Gallup research interviewing more than 200 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) showed how they deal with mental health and wellbeing. These are some of the most common approaches:
1) Expand Employee Assistance Program offerings
Large organizations were already offering Employee assistance programs, but now they are expanding the offering and promoting them more. These include yoga classes, meditation, individual consultation and other services contributing to mental-health assistance.
2) Use surveys to identify high-risk groups, target communication and show you care.
Pulse surveys can identify teams, departments, or locations that are seeing increased levels of stress, anxiety, or burnout. These surveys provide instant information as they are short and easy to analyze, and can be sent regularly (typically only 5-15 questions, therefore, they are not time-consuming and are very easy to answer). They can also provide helpful information for the employee and give them a sense that someone cares for them.
3) Use the strengths of individual employees to share resources internally
Companies are starting to use more resources from within the organization. Some employees may be natural leaders, emotional supports, peer coaches or experts in yoga or mindfulness sessions. Organizations need to identify potential employee volunteers to be trained “well-being advocates,” who can organically connect better with other employees.
4) Upskill managers to have caring conversations
Leaders and middle managers should have conversations with their employees more often than when working face-to-face, and not all of them should focus on “Did you meet your objectives or not?”. They should also be comfortable driving informal conversations about general well-being. If this is not something they used to do in the past, leaders should be trained in soft skills like empathy, bias, mental health, psychological safety, and dealing with difficult conversations. During one-on-ones, leaders can even start by asking simple questions to make sure employees sleep enough, eat well, exercise, and have time off as needed. They can also communicate that it is OK to go off-screen during a video call or see someone in the background. Professionalism should be more about meeting objectives and being transparent about issues, not about perfection and acting like infallible heroes.
5) As a leader, be vulnerable about your struggles
Leaders should be more candid and open about how they feel and how they also struggle. If they are the first to share that they are using mental health services or other well-being resources, it sends a message to the employees that self-care is OK and expected.
Some other strategies I have found in interviewing leaders are:
– Buddy programs, where you randomly pair people to get to know each other
– Open Zoom meetings where everybody can jump in and connect
– Share more company updates and discuss individually any concerns
– Hire external coaches to help leaders deal with their struggles and be able to connect with the ones of their employees
– Promote and support events related to mental health. This month there will be a virtual summit on mental health called Let’s talk about it, where 41 experts will speak during 41 days about their struggles and share some tools that help them.
– Organize Equality groups where people can feel free to talk about specific hot/taboo topics within a small group that deals with similar issues or shares common traits
– Implement both synchronous and asynchronous communications to make sure employees have different ways to communicate based on their different needs
Improving the quality of the relationship with teammates and caring for their mental health significantly impacts the bottom line, performance, engagement and innovation. Performance increases while turnover rates and absences decrease significantly. Moreover, systemic issues like fear, disengagement and stress are tackled promptly and more thoughtfully.
