As the world is healing, offices are starting to work offline. And the mental health of the employees is on an all time low!
There is a huge requirement to bring up the spirit of the employees and make them feel secure and empowered. Here are 6 tips on how you, as a manager, can support employee mental health at workplace:
– Model Healthy Behaviour
The very first thing you can do to ensure good mental health of your employees is modelling a healthy and friendly behaviour. Don’t just say you support mental health. Model it so that your team members feel they can prioritise self-care and set boundaries. Ordinarily, a manager stresses about the team’s well-being so much so that they forget to take care of themselves. You can share your ways of getting rid of the stress with your employees. Create a personal bond with them and treat them as a friend.
– Constantly Check-in
Intentionally checking in with each of your direct reports on a regular basis is more critical than ever. Now that the employees are returning back to working from offices. The lockdown has had a mental toll on almost everyone. In a study with Qualtrics and SAP, nearly 40% of global employees said that no one at their company had asked them if they were doing okay. And those respondents were 38% more likely than others to say that their mental health had declined since the outbreak. In such times, the least a manager can do is check on their employees and ensure they are doing okay. To really ensure good mental well being, you can go beyond a simple “how are you?” Ask specific questions and ensure necessary support.
– Communicate Regularly
Communication is the key. The study with Qualtrics and SAP also 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. So the simplest thing you can do, as a manager, is to talk to your team. You can unload stress by setting expectations about workloads, where possible. Prioritising what must get done, and acknowledging what can slide if necessary.
– Modify Practices and Policies
Modification of practices and policies, here, implies being flexible. 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 policies might also need tweaking. Performance reviews can be reframed as compassionate feedback. You should go a bit easy on your employees and try to avoid civil unrest whenever possible.
– Schedule Training
More training sessions implies regular honing of skills. It is as simple as this. Scheduling more training sessions allows your employees to stay up to date with the trends. This enables employees to stay in the finest form and boost organisational performance. And a good organisation must treat it’s employees well.
– Set-up Awareness Sessions
Now more than ever, you should focus on proactive and preventive workplace mental health training. For leaders, managers, and individual contributors as well.
And at last, you should get rid of the hectic manual processes and implement an HRMS. Spine HR Suite is the one stop HR solution for all your requirements. With a vast experience of more than 2 decades and an international presence, Spine HR Suite is the best HR Tool in the market. You can learn more about Spine HR Suite here.