Mental Well-Being as a Business Imperative

I was having a conversation with someone the other day, and we talked about the importance of mental well-being for organizations. It was really interesting to hear their perspective on how companies these days should be managing the mental well-being of their people. Whether it should be front and centre, given the challenges that people faced during the pandemic, or whether there should be now a shift and reframe back towards performance and productivity.??

As we talked, I thought it strange that these two things are still seen as separate. That organizations think that they can/should EITHER focus on well-being OR performance, but that it’s somehow incompatible to consider both of them in the same breath.??

Because when you look at it on paper, all the evidence points to the exact opposite.??

It points to the fact that performance is entirely dependent on mental well-being.?

If you don’t have good mental well-being, you can’t have employees who are achieving their full potential or doing their best work. It makes total sense that they are so interrelated. Yet this is still brushed over by so many organizations who prefer to see well-being as a nice to have, something they “should do” or an add-on they’ll get round to at some point.??

The thing with mental well-being is that it doesn’t show up as much indirect costs as physical health. Instead, where it really hurts organizations is hidden within the indirect costs associated with things like presenteeism, which is much more difficult to measure tangibly. With people showing up to work but not doing their best work because they aren’t in the right headspace to be productive. They can’t focus, they can’t as easily connect with their colleagues, and they feel less engaged.??

How can you possibly create a high performing organization if you don’t have a strategy for making sure your people are in their best possible mental state? Their best possible performance state??

And the scary thing is the sheer level of mental distress in the general population. It’s not a small problem we are talking about here.?According to the World Health Organization, about 1 in 4 people will be diagnosed with a mental health disorder at some point in their lives - 1 in 4. What’s more, this is most likely to appear in people’s prime working years - between the age of 25–and 45, although it varies slightly across different disorders. Think about that in terms of your workforce. Your team. When One Mind at Work in the US did the calculations on the prevalence of depression, they suggested that for a business with 10,000 employees and a male/female ratio of 45%/55%, nearly 1,000 employees are likely suffering from depression.?

And it’s not going to get better anytime soon, with considerable evidence suggesting that rates of mental health challenges are highest in young adults who are just on the cusp of entering the workforce.??

So it’s not an EITHER/OR situation we’re talking about here. It is a BOTH/AND situation. And it’s a situation that all organizations need to get a handle on if they are not already doing so.??

I think part of the issue is an image problem. Some see well-being as soft and fluffy and the antithesis of hard-nosed performance outcomes. But despite these image differences, they have a clear commonality. And that commonality is the brain.??

It’s the same brain that delivers those performance outcomes as is experiencing that state of mental wellbeing - so why should they be treated or viewed differently? They are in fact the same thing and the sooner organizations realize this, the sooner they can reimagine the middle ground where it’s possible to achieve both high performance and exceptional well-being. To do so, you just have to better understand the thing that underpins them both - the brain.?

Thanks for reading this edition of the BrainUP newsletter; I hope you enjoyed the topic this week. Here are some ways to learn about insights and applications of neuroscience in business and your life:?

1. Visit our Learning Lab:

→?Get more resources?to learn more about how brains work and how they are critical to organisational development.?

2. Join me for Live events - leave with practical applications of the sciences:?

→?Follow me on LinkedIn, where I post live event details and more on neuroscience and work. Live Events are always free to join.

3. Subscribe to receive more newsletters full of tips on how to level up your brain:?

• → Join the almost 6000 subscribers,?subscribe?to receive weekly BrainUP newsletters.