8 Ways Managers Can Support Employees’ Mental Health
INTRO
At In Bloom, we’re focusing more and more of our efforts on enabling managers with principles of mental health. We do this because businesses are starting to realise it’s a must after the difficult events we’ve experienced recently.
Having delivered mental health awareness training to more than 50 organisations in Australia and New Zealand in 2022, we’ve had the pleasure to collaborate with a lot of great leaders, gather quality feedback, and improve our mental health awareness courses and workshops from this.
Occasionally, we will share articles from other trusted sources if we found them valuable when we first read them. This post has been written by Kelly Greenwood and Natasha Krol, and originally appeared in HBR. You can find the original post here.
We thought we would share it because it adresses nicely one of the pillars we cover in the second learning outcome of our Mental Health Awareness Workshop for managers.
Summary
According to recent research, 42% of global employees have experienced a decline in mental health since the pandemic began. What can managers do to support their team members during these trying times?
The authors offer eight concrete actions managers and leaders can take today to improve mental health in the face of unprecedented uncertainty, including expressing their own vulnerability, modeling healthy behaviors, and building a culture of communication.
Even in the most uncertain of times, the role of a manager remains the same: to support your team members. That includes supporting their mental health. The good news is that many of the tools you need to do so are the same ones that make you an effective manager.
Be vulnerable. One silver lining of the pandemic is that it is normalizing mental health challenges. Almost everyone has experienced some level of discomfort. But the universality of the experience will translate into a decrease in stigma only if people, especially people in power, share their experiences. Being honest about your mental health struggles as a leader opens the door for employees to feel comfortable talking with you about mental health challenges of their own.
Model healthy behaviors. Don’t just say you support mental health. Model it so that your team members feel they can prioritize self-care and set boundaries. More often than not, managers are so focused on their team’s well-being and on getting the work done that they forget to take care of themselves. Share that you’re taking a walk in the middle of the day, having a therapy appointment, or prioritizing a staycation (and actually turning off email) so that you don’t burn out.
Build a culture of connection through check-ins. Intentionally checking in with each of your direct reports on a regular basis is more critical than ever. That was important but often underutilized in pre-pandemic days. Now, with so many people working from home, it can be even harder to notice the signs that someone is struggling.
Offer flexibility and be inclusive. Expect that the situation, your team’s needs, and your own needs will continue to change. Check in regularly — particularly at transition points. You can help problem-solve any issues that come up only if you know what’s happening. Those conversations will also give you an opportunity to reiterate norms and practices that support mental health. Inclusive flexibility is about proactive communication and norm-setting that helps people design and preserve the boundaries they need.
Communicate more than you think you need to. Our study with Qualtrics and SAP showed that employees who felt their managers were not good at communicating have been 23% more likely than others to experience mental health declines since the outbreak. Make sure you keep your team informed about any organizational changes or updates. Clarify any modified work hours and norms. Remove stress where possible by setting expectations about workloads, prioritizing what must get done, and acknowledging what can slide if necessary.
Invest in training. Now more than ever, you should prioritize proactive and preventive workplace mental health training for leaders, managers, and individual contributors. Before the pandemic, companies including Morrison & Foerster and Verizon Media were convening senior leaders to discuss their role in creating a mentally healthy culture.
Modify policies and practices. To reduce stress on everyone, be as generous and flexible as possible in updating policies and practices in reaction to the pandemic and civil unrest. For example, you may need to take a closer look at your rules and norms around flexible hours, paid time off, email and other communications, and paid and unpaid leave.
Measure. Ensuring accountability doesn’t have to be complicated; it can be handled in a simple pulse survey done regularly to understand how people are doing now and over time. BlackRock, the global investment management firm, is one of many organizations that have conducted pulse surveys during the pandemic to understand the primary stressors and needs of staff.
References:
https://hbr.org/2020/08/8-ways-managers-can-support-employees-mental-health