Article: Mental Health at Work- What’s Your HR Department Doing Wrong?
Author: Asif Upadhye,
Director
Never Grow Up
Never Grow Up
 |
Asif
Upadhye, Director, Never Grow Up
|
It will not be justified to
say that the importance of the health of the individual employee has been
undermined and ignored. But
having said that, there seems to be a dearth of initiatives to ensure that
employees are mentally healthy.
What
is health?
It’s interesting how we
usually picture a person without any overt disease or ailment when we think of
a healthy person. Health
is more than just the absence of disease. To be healthy is to be holistically
sound in terms of physical, mental and emotional well-being. However, an understanding
of mental health often poses to be difficult primarily because most issues
remain covert for a very long time and its absence is more noticeable than its
presence. Mental
and emotional well-being
is thus an integral component of health that needs to be addressed better at
the workplace.
Awareness about the need for optimum mental health thus needs to be driven
through.
Is
EAP enough?
So, you have Employee
Assistance Programmes in place? That’s great but is that really enough?
Moreover, is it a generic EAP initiative or does it fit with your employee
demographics and their individual needs? Not only do you need to ensure that
employees avail of these services readily and willingly but also enable them to
act on their mental health needs to move towards greater mental well-being. Employees need to be
encouraged to introspect and understand their own needs and then seek help if
need be. Moreover,
they need to be made to understand that they are not being judged for availing
a counselling service for example. The
stigma associated with mental ill-health
is often so overpowering.
Distressed
destressing
Stress is often looked upon
as an omnipotent, ubiquitous by-product
of work. While
there are varied destressing and detox workshops, destressing has unfortunately
become simply another box you need to tick off your to-do list. So, how do you ensure that employees destress not just
because they have to or wait till the time that they are close to having a
burnout before asking for help? It’s
thus not enough to have sporadic yoga, breathing and meditation sessions. The idea is to make the art
of destressing and mindful living a way of life at work.
Statistic figures of
depressed, burned out and overly anxious individuals at the workplace today do
not paint a pretty picture. It’s apparent that the
services in place are not adequate when it comes to the variety of mental
health issues that employees battle with (often sub-consciously). More often than not, these
issues are attended to, or rather noticed only when the performance metric get
affected and productivity dips noticeably.
While the onus of
organizational mental well-being
lies with each individual, the HR department should probably take up the task
and lead the process of ownership on this. If not for anything else, because they
are regarded as the body that is (or
should be) of
the people, by the people and for the people. Mental illness spans over a
wide spectrum and is a question of degree. There are times when each of us needs
a little bit of external help to manage our stress better especially with work-life spill-over becoming more common. It’s time we re-think the need to
understand and improve mental health at work and make workplaces happier places
to work in.
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