Mental health and psychological safety in the modern workplace

A year into the Covid-19 pandemic here in Europe, isolation, illness, grief, and worry is taking its toll. A McKinsey report states that 62% of workers worldwide consider mental health “a top challenge”.

Talking with friends, family, and colleagues, reading articles, and watching the news - the trend is clear – many have struggled with mental health over the past 12 months. Many have for the first time felt the need to reach out to get professional help.

Mental health and psychological safety

While mental health doesn’t have the stigma it once did, employees are still reluctant to share their struggles with their managers. Perhaps they are uncomfortable opening up to feeling vulnerable, exposing themselves as less of a “perfect” employee. Or perhaps they are worried about risking their job in an unstable work market. More than ever should psychological safety amongst our employees be of highest priority. HR and managers need to actively nurture a culture which embraces trust and openness, which is a key element in creating a psychologically safe work environment.

Organisations need to step up and take more responsibility when it comes to the mental health of their workforce. Both with regards to the offering of services to their employees, training and support for their managers, and nurturing a supportive and open culture.

Here are a few tips to how you can more actively address mental health in your organisation:

• Be vocal and open about supporting mental wellness in your organisation and normalise the struggles your staff face.
• Offer mental health services to your employees as part of your benefits package.
• Offer training to managers in how to create a psychologically safe work environment and deal with mental health issues in their staff.
• Initiate fora where colleagues can support each other. Eg. smaller groups which are employee run and make it easier to open up and share on a personal level.
• Make sure your employees are balanced at work. Too much or too little to do can be just as harmful.
• Actively use feedback as a way of making your employees feel valuable, included, and seen.
• Coach your managers and give them the tools to enable close and meaningful follow-up of their team members.

Technology can never replace human interaction. In CatalystOne, however, we strongly believe that technology can free up time and enable both increased and improved employee follow-up. As part of our complete HCM suite we offer easy-to-use tools for both Work Balance and Continuous Performance. Work Balance will help you support your employees in finding the right level of challenges and enough time to work on those challenges. Continuous Performance offers tools for feedback, one-to-one check-ins, and appraisals.

Let us know if there is anything we can do to help.