Leading the Dialogue on Mental Fitness for World Mental Health Day

World Mental Health Day should provide an opportunity for all of us to pause and take stock. It’s not just a time to reflect on our own sense of wellbeing, but as leaders, on the mental fitness of our organisations – a topic that’s becoming a strategic business priority for many.

From the daily challenges of the pandemic to global crisis events, the last two years have taken their toll on our collective state of mind. A study by Harvard Business Review from earlier this year, covering multiple sectors across 49 countries, found that 89% of respondents said their work-life balance was getting worse, and 85% said their wellbeing had declined since the onset of the pandemic.?

What is mental fitness?

Recently, sports stars including Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles have been praised for recognising vocally the influence of their psychological wellbeing on their sporting abilities. Being “fit”, that is to say energised, positive, learning-oriented and agile state of mind, enhances an individual’s daily existence and by extension their professional performance. So the importance of nurturing mental fitness at both the individual and organisational levels of corporates and financial institutions cannot be overstated. It is still all too easy to underestimate the impact of poor mental fitness on company-level performance.

What’s more, mental fitness is set to become the new battleground for attracting and retaining talent in an increasingly competitive market. We believe this trend will continue, and mental fitness will begin to be viewed as a source of competitive advantage.

And yet, in the course of several conversations with leaders across different sectors, we’ve found that many don’t believe their organisation is performing at peak mental fitness. In fact, on a scale of one to five, where one is emotional exhaustion and burnout, and five is collective emotional and cognitive excellence, many leaders rate their organisation around a three.

Furthermore, only a few of our respondents are using mental fitness as a measure of organisational performance.

To mark World Mental Health Day and highlight the current challenges around mental fitness, we’ve decided to share some of the insights we’ve gathered.

Mental Fitness Affects Everyone - But Not Equally

The issue of mental health inequality was one of the most apparent and recurring themes to emerge from our discussions, and it’s a multi-faceted issue. It’s widely accepted that women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, mainly due to school closures and juggling childcare responsibilities with working from home.

However, the geographical and sectoral influences shouldn’t be underestimated either. For instance, leaders in organisations with a significant presence in Asian countries where mental health is considered a greater taboo were more likely to feel that their companies were lagging behind more Western-centric counterparts.

Similarly, and perhaps inevitably, employees in sectors hit worst by the pandemic tended to suffer more than those who rode it out on a fairly even keel.

The age factor also came up, highlighted by Neil Piper, Chief People Officer at KFC. He told us: “I believe there’s a real risk of not truly understanding the impact on the demographic of young people in their twenties. Many of them live in shared housing, and lockdowns had them living, working, and sleeping in a box.”

Add into the mix that many in this demographic are also in the junior stages of their careers and likely to feel less empowered or in control of their work-life balance, which can often go overlooked.

Span of Control is a Critical Factor

Neil’s comments bring us onto another set of critical themes that recurred during our conversations – who is responsible for mental fitness anyway; and how much is down to the employee versus the organisation.

Jason Spivey, HR Director at investment bank Lazard, shared his view that it’s an equal balance of both: “There needs to be a shared responsibility to achieve the best outcomes in individual and organisational mental fitness. As individuals, we all have a responsibility to be self-aware. Still, the organisation has a role to play in creating space for people to think and reflect, and providing programs to develop people’s awareness.”

Span of control is a key lever for firms to use in creating a positive employee mindset, and favourable conditions for employees to take control of their own mental wellbeing. For example, some organisations are moving from command and control to empowering employees to take responsibility for factors such as where and how they work. Similarly, line managers thrive when given the agency to determine what’s best for their reports rather than being hamstrung by rigid policies that fail to take into account individual circumstances. The ability to prioritise and manage our own time and that of our teams is a key component of the flexible working discussion that has dominated the return to work for many, though is also central to the broader dialogue about time management and mental health.

Gordon Pitman, CHRO at GKN Aerospace, believes it’s down to leaders and managers to build an organisational and team structure that allows their employees to work effectively. This includes encouraging delegation and empowering all levels of leadership to ensure that the mental fitness of their organisation is a continuous work in progress.

It is important to recognise that these issues affect managers as much as employees, particularly those with larger teams. One HRD told us that some of their managers had felt overwhelmed by the challenges of the pandemic and the scale of changes. Therefore, it became increasingly important to help the managers to help their team members.

Finally, at a time when many companies are attempting to become more agile, providing the right conditions for innovation and a learning mindset has never been more important. Mental fitness is linked to cognitive ability and psychological safety, which underpin the ability to develop new ideas and implement them – the definition of innovation and agility.

Mental Fitness Initiatives in Action

During our discussions, leaders shared many examples of activities and initiatives to help improve mental fitness - too many to share all of them. But for instance, Tanuj Kapilashrami, CHRO of Standard Chartered Bank, was one of the leaders we talked to in a more geographically diverse company, and she shared how they’re leveraging the established D&I governance to appoint wellbeing champions in each country. These individuals are tasked with rolling out initiatives focusing on physical and financial as well as psychological wellbeing, with the D&I governance and processes providing a background framework.

The pandemic led to a widespread sense of disconnection, which has proven detrimental to mental health and individual results. A sense of belonging, being understood and valued, is also now accepted to be critical to employee engagement, which has powerful links to individual and company performance. Tanuj Kapilashrami also revealed: “We did an experiment among the leadership group called Living Libraries – each of us as a book that’s there to help us tell our story – bringing our real and best self. It’s aimed at ensuring we have a culture which normalises vulnerability and showcases that each of us has our story that’s unique and permanently evolving.”

Carl Clarke, Vodafone’s Director of Talent, Learning & Skills, said that his company’s Wellbeing framework had been developed to help individuals manage their mental, physical, emotional and financial sense of wellbeing. A new digital resilience self-assessment tool had also been introduced to help employees and managers assess how effective they are at remote working. This includes targeted learning content to enable employees to close gaps and build their resilience levels. The tools provide a holistic approach to supporting employees to manage “techno-stress,” work-life boundaries, home and work relationships, as well as raising awareness of their emotional state.

Tristram Roberts, Group HR Director at Barclays, talked to a very straightforward idea – asking leaders to open up to colleagues with their own stories, hints and tips about how they cope with everyday challenges, such as time management. He told us that one area of the business had recently created a video together with colleagues explaining how they manage their day, which helped share different experiences and ideas.

Similarly, at a listed defence business, the CEO has been open about his own challenges throughout the pandemic, helping to build trust and openness across the organisation. This has encouraged other organisations to open up about the subject and actively set up mental health programs. For example, recently, industrial organisations with a large cohort of blue-collar, male employees have started to embed mental fitness programs into their day to day jobs.

So initiatives don’t need to be lengthy or expensive to implement – simply acknowledging the challenges from the very top can help embed the right messages throughout the organisation.?