Four Ways Leaders Can Promote Workplace Wellbeing
As the economy reopens and people return to work, many individuals are feeling increased anxiety and stress. This applies both to those returning to the workplace after months on furlough and those who have continued working throughout the pandemic, now feeling close to burnout in many instances.
While overall responsibility for employee wellbeing tends to lie with human resource or occupational health functions, leaders play a key role in ensuring that a culture of wellbeing permeates the entire organization, from the top down.
To mark Mental Health Awareness Week, here are four ways in which leaders can take control of stress and actively promote wellbeing at work:
1. Recognize your own role in ‘stresscalation’
As soon as leaders get stressed, they start seeing the world through the lens of stress, explains executive coach Martin Boroson of the One Moment Company.
‘Suddenly, you’ll find it’s you who’s raising your voice and failing to provide the necessary details people need to get their job done,” he says. “It’s you who gives projects false urgency, who ends meetings late, or who speaks abruptly to everyone. It’s a domino effect. Your stress becomes someone else’s stress, and this becomes someone else’s stress, hence the term ‘stresscalation’.”
During challenging times, stress can become the default way of doing business and putting a stop to ‘stresscalation’ is often easier said than done. This is particularly true if you are part of someone else’s ‘stresscalation’ and have just had their stress dumped on you.
2. View hybrid working as a “‘work in progress’’
Hybrid working brings benefits to workers, not least in terms of flexibility and reduced commuting time. At the same time, however, it can hinder collaboration, affect interpersonal relationships in the workplace and lead to workers feeling like they are “always on” – with all the pressure and stress that can bring. For these reasons, leaders need to keep working on hybrid working.
“Hybrid working is not a slight variation on how we’ve been working in the past,” points out Carmel Moore, an organizational consultant and leadership coach, as well as Boronson’s colleague from The One Moment Company. “It is a completely new way of working.”
Moore believes that organizations need to fundamentally learn how to “do” hybrid working. “Instead of focusing on the externals – technology upgrades, new HR policies, and a rejigged real estate footprint – leaders need to focus on the internals,” she says. “They need to start designing the new way of work by listening and taking stock of how priorities have changed, not only for their people, but also for their customers.”
3. Take back the reins
In challenging times, well-meaning leaders may be inclined to defer their leadership and attempt to manage by committee. But leadership coach Mark Mudford believes this approach can often be counterproductive and place even greater stress on the team.
“It’s engaging the tribe, but in the wrong way,” he says. “I would argue that a leader using this approach is actually abdicating their responsibility. A good leader will engage the team to find all the options, but ultimately it is the leader’s job to select the best solution.”
4. Embed wellbeing into the heart of the organization
Sustainability is now at the forefront of many organizations. Yet varying degrees of attention tend to be paid to one of the four key pillars of sustainability: human sustainability. This is the view of Neil Gaught, sustainability consultant and author of CORE: How a Single Organizing Idea can Change Business For Good.
“Leaders have a responsibility to ensure they are driving forward human sustainability across the organization, so that issues like employee wellbeing become part of their DNA,” argues Gaught. “The result is that rather than having to spend time investing in resources to support employees to recover from workplace-induced stress and illness, there will be less instances of it in the first place.”
A lot of the stress that exists in today’s workplace is the result of too few people being asked to do too much, in too little time, with too few resources. If leaders bore this in mind when managing projects – and allocated more people, time and resources as needed – they would significantly reduce stress in their workplaces and boost the mental wellbeing of their teams.
References:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypercy/2021/05/10/four-ways-leaders-can-promote-workplace-wellbeing/?sh=29a05c02b8af