The COVID-19 pandemic, which has left many of us working at home for months, has intensified the impact of work on our personal wellness.
While such changes have undoubtedly allowed many employees to prove their efficiency, their well-being has also suffered. The financial crisis, widespread layoffs, and steep unemployment have increased pressure on those fortunate enough to still have jobs. Meanwhile, under remote work conditions, opportunities to build and maintain positive and supportive relationships with colleagues — which can boost job satisfaction — have dwindled. Boundaries between work and life have eroded for those who work from home, leading many to feel like they live at work because of pandemic-limited opportunities for entertainment and socializing. And societally, we’ve all been touched by crippling uncertainty and ongoing worries for ourselves and our loved ones.
These precarious conditions have triggered an epidemic of burnout and left many employees struggling to cope. Companies, therefore, need to proactively identify their overarching cultural challenges and holistically design support systems that address the specific forms of stress and anxiety their employees face. One effective approach is to act as a sieve, filtering out and addressing manageable, upstream problems as much as possible before they become critical for individual employees.
Preempting Work Stressors
With the rise of remote work and the erosion of work-life boundaries, employees need to disconnect. At the preemptive stage, a focus on the organizational culture is essential to promote self-care values and healthy work-life boundaries. Leaders can proactively address these issues in several ways.
Model wellness and balance for your team:
As a leader, it’s not enough to say that you prioritize wellness and announce a few virtual wellness events or services via your intranet or in internal communications. Each manager, supervisor, and team leader has a responsibility to demonstrate the company’s commitment to well-being. Valuing your well-being shows your team that you value theirs, too. In practice, this may mean actually using your vacation days, being open about the block on your calendar reserved for a therapy appointment, or just recommending a great personal development book you’ve read.
Monitor workloads:
This is an obvious concern if your organization has shrunk its workforce, but a more subtle — in fact, invisible — element is the workload your employees face at home. We all need balance. While monitoring productivity is likely to be intrusive and actually increases employees’ pressures to perform, monitoring workloads — including regularly assessing job design and possibly reallocating tasks among your employees — takes a bigger-picture perspective.
Introduce a bookend to each working day:
The lack of a clear beginning and end to the workday blurs the distinction between home and work life, leading to a muddle of demands and distractions. Some companies are promoting virtual commutes to mark the boundaries of the workday without the hassle of traffic or travel. Casual morning conversations over coffee or occasional end-of-day happy hours offer sociable ways to connect with colleagues. Such a window of time can offer employees an opportunity to reflect, refresh, gain a bigger-picture perspective, and set goals.
Revisit your company’s values:
If we learned anything as a society in 2020, it’s that we need to take a hard look at the way we live, work, and play. It’s essential to reevaluate how you, as a leader, show up for your employees — not just your clients. Thoroughly examine your company values and see if they still hold up in practice after a year of remote work.
If practice and values align, consider how you’ll incorporate these values in your future in-person, fully remote, or hybrid workplace — and if there’s a gap between values and practice, figure out what needs to shift to align them.
Embed wellness in the employee review process:
Whether your company does reviews annually, quarterly, or monthly, make wellness a part of the process. Take the opportunity to find out if your employees feel taken care of and ask for feedback on how the company is supporting your staff’s well-being.
A review isn’t just a moment for managers to provide team members with individualized feedback; it’s a critical moment to hear from them whether they feel valued, heard, and cared for as members of the company. This conversation shows employees that the organization truly cares about them and offers the bonus of allowing the company to continually improve and elevate effective well-being benefits.
Conclusion
As vaccinations become more available and some companies plan for their office returns, some people are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But even in the best-case scenario, the pandemic will have left countless employees with mental health scars. Those scars require swift action and a profound but strategic rethinking of mental health support and how to create the right structures at the organizational level — now and in the post-pandemic future.
While nothing can replace trained mental health support providers, when employees and managers have a better understanding of the issues, they can provide meaningful support. Training HR practitioners and employees about ways to deal with their own and others’ mental health is a good starting point. Mentoring programs can capitalize on such training and benefit both mentees’ and mentors’ mental health.
Employees can also benefit from interacting with informal groups of colleagues they are comfortable with — an ideal context to share and normalize work-related worries.
