With Mental Health Awareness Week having just ended, and our friends at Petaurum HR publishing part 1 in this series on Maintaining Mental Health at Work in last week's Business Post, we're following up with further insight on proactive measures employers can take to maintain their employees' wellbeing.
It's inevitable that life can be difficult and the stresses we face can sometimes overwhelm us. This applies within the workplace too. According to research, mental health problems in the UK workforce cost employers almost £118 billion annually, so recognising mental health problems at work is extremely important.
With this in mind, it's important to be able to manage and improve the mental health of your workplace. There are many techniques you can adopt but here are our Top 5 Tips:
Opening up about our feelings is hard, even more so when you're suffering with anxiety, stress or other types of mental health issues.
Creating dialogues can benefit everyone involved as it will lead to a strong, dynamic team who feel comfortable and safe around one another. This could be in a one-to-one setting or as outlined in last week's article, through the creation of a Wellbeing Action Plan.
You could also offer an Employee Assistance Programme, giving staff access to 24/7 confidential help and advice through a variety of channels and services they might need.
Experts say that most people should do about 30 minutes exercise at least five times a week but if you're working a sedentary job then finding the time can be difficult.
By taking yourself away from your workstation to have lunch, you're already helping improve mental health by changing your environment. Squeezing in a 10–15-minute walk during lunch will also help no end; it also helps prevent the afternoon slump that affects productivity.
3. Promote a Work/Life Balance
It can be so easy to let work consume our lives, especially if you have a demanding job. But getting a good work/life balance is essential to not only enjoying work and increasing productivity but to leading a happy and successful life.
As an employer, encouraging holidays is a good place to start to allow your staff time to wind-down and recharge. If employees have a good quality life outside of work, it will show in the workplace. Consider flexible working patterns too.
Managers are unlikely to be experts in dealing with the mental health issues of their team.
Less than half of workers who experience mental health problems feel well supported by their line manager, which shows how important it is to equip your management team properly.
Online training is an effective way to do this; the mental health charity Mind have e-Learning courses available, some of which are free for people working in small workplaces. This will give managers confidence to speak openly about mental health making them more accessible for employees who need support.
Employee benefits have been a long-standing feature of most businesses' reward packages, but recently the conversation has shifted to wellbeing and how businesses can utilise benefits to improve the wellbeing of their workforce.
Here are some ideas based around 3 core facets of wellbeing:
- Mental: It's important to think about encouraging and maintaining good mental health within your workforce, not just helping those who might be struggling. There are some amazing online platforms full of rich content that will help people with relaxation, mindfulness and resilience.
There are also a range of advice lines from counselling support lines that help with issues people may be struggling to deal with such as bereavement, relationships or trauma, through to ‘elder care' advice to help those with caring responsibilities navigate their way through the maze of the social care system. Quite often the root cause of a mental health issue is external to the workplace, but the impact can have such a significant effect on work so it's unwise to ignore it.
- Physical: there are lots of highly effective and great value for money options from health club concessions, providing access to a private GP and online exercise classes.
Alternatives might be to encourage ‘walking meetings', a ‘steps' challenge, providing healthy eating options or a water cooler to maintain hydration.
If you have more budget, then Health Cash Plans are an excellent option, or you may wish to consider private medical insurance. Some of these benefits are preventative – helping people stay healthy, and others are reactive – helping people recover as quickly as possible if they do become ill or sustain an injury.
- Financial: There are many options to consider, from retail discounts to help save money (holidays, car leasing and many other retail purchases), HMRC approved salary sacrifice schemes on anything from bikes and electric cars to computers and pension contributions or the provision of access to independent financial advice, perhaps for an annual financial health check.
There are also benefits, such as cinema discounts that fit into more than one category as they not only help people save money on the price of a ticket, but also going to the cinema is a nice, relaxing and enjoyable thing to do which will have a positive effect on mental wellbeing.
Unless you're willing to scour the market searching the right content, the ideal solution is to find a platform that contains all of this in one place! Benefits Cloud is one such option - providing a scheme like this will not only help with maintain employees' wellbeing, but also in attracting and retaining talent into your business.
By making these changes to your business, you're taking steps towards a better workplace for everyone involved, not to mention any future employees looking into your working culture. Supporting a healthy mental health environment will boost productivity, profitability and staff relationships between themselves and with customers.
To discuss how you can support your employees' wellbeing please contact Mark:
mark@petaurumhr.co.uk | www.petauruhr.co.uk | 01522 719438