Improving The Mental Health Of Your Employees

Mental health is a hot topic in recent years, and that’s thanks to continual awareness and development surrounding the topic. No longer is it a taboo to struggle with mental health issues, nor to admit you need to spend some time maintaining it. People often take time off work to have a ‘mental health day’ from time to time, while we are all too aware that the artifice of a corporate environment can grind staff down.

This means that as an employer, doing everything you can to help maintain or improve the mental health of your employees is important. Of course, if they are in need of real help, then it’s essential for you to give them the platform to find the referrals they need. Investing in a great HR department, being understanding, and ensuring that struggling staff are confidentially asked if they are okay are an important few steps any boss can take.

But what about the daily lived experience of your staff? How might your efforts help or hinder this approach? We would like to posit the following:

The Beauty Of Nature

It has been found that those within at least one mile proximity to a large green space can suffer less stress, even within residential cities. This means that the power of nature is important to recognize. Does that mean you need to turn your office into a jungle with vines, plants and turf everywhere? Not likely. However, through the use of commercial landscape maintenance surrounding your building, ensuring the office has some greenery or indoor bonsai trees, and allowing an exterior communal area to have more thought put into its development can have a massive subconscious impact on those in your office, and that can be important.

Workload

The workload of your staff is important to consider. While during crunch time it may be tempting to place books and books of contracts or tasks that your staff need to fill on their desk, it can also be important to hire temp agents to help with the added workload, evenly distribute these extra efforts, or give staff more time to deal with this added effort. At the very least, rewarding staff thoroughly for overtime and ensuring they can reject it if needed can thoroughly decrease stress levels in your office to no untold degree.

Regularity & Predictability

Ensure you are regular and fair with your employees. Consistency is key. You can’t ask for them to come in three times after hours one week and never again for the rest of the month. You cannot keep giving them shift patterns all over the place, moving them from department to department so they never truly settle. You cannot be caring one moment with your HR practice and unavailable the next. You need to be consistent, and ensure that staff can depend on you. When they know they’re in a place that has clarity and consistency as part of their framework, stress levels will drop significantly, and that’s very important.

With this advice, we hope you can thoroughly and properly improve the mental health of your employees.

This is a contributed post.