Tips on how leadership can enable and embed a mentally healthy workplace during turbulance

With many organisations restructuring and undergoing transformations in strategy including cost optimisation and digitisation, there is a need to maintain a sense of business continuity. The challenge for leaders, should they choose to accept, is to invest effort in shaping a mentally healthy workplace for your employees. The benefit flows both ways - helping craft the employee experience for the better despite change and uncertainty, and equally helping the business to maintain effectiveness and efficiency throughout change. 

 Here is our thinking.

First, engage your team by activating mental health as a priority, and inviting them to contribute to this important mission.

Second, build your team by granting them the space, safety and also responsibility to make mental health a priority.

Third, connect with your team by encouraging collaboration and promoting a mentally healthy workplace.

By engaging, building, and connecting, you can promote the fulfilment of your employees’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, respectively. When teammates are engaged by their leaders to contribute to an overarching priority this will increase their sense of control. When teammates are empowered because their leaders delegate responsibility and provide challenging tasks they will build competence. Finally, when teammates are connected they will feel a sense of belongingness.

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept, that goes for all of us, but especially those who have a leadership role.

Here are some practical steps you can take to make mental health a priority in your workplace: 

• Prioritise mental health on meeting agendas – this makes mental health a common topic for discussion that is messaged from leadership. It’s about setting the tone from the top. 
• Schedule non-negotiable mental health breaks – as simple as it sounds, it’s a short-fuse approach to breaking bad habits and embedding better ones. Think to set your 10 minute mindfulness Monday breaks or 20 minute wellbeing walks on Wednesday and inviting your teammates to set their breaks too.
• Regularly review workloads – to ensure workers have enough resources (in terms of time, administrative support or equipment) to cope with the job demands. Workloads can be reviewed during team meetings, through an informal check-in or by undertaking mentally healthy workplace assessments.

Leadership play a crucial role in shaping the direction of mentally healthy workplaces and workplace mental health.

What do you do to enable and embed a mentally healthy workplace during turbulence?

https://www.wilmarschaufeli.nl/publications/Schaufeli/441.pdf