Employee mental health impacts your entire workplace. This is why it’s important for you to enact tips like these to help everyone feel and work better. When you stop to understand the impact of this, you see why it’s so important for you to take the time to enact some tips that will help everyone feel and work better.
How Mental Health Issues Impacts Performance
You may be surprised by the number of people who still go to work while suffering from mental health issues like depression and anxiety. The key to helping employees remain productive is supportive performance management. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone will be able to continue working through their mental health illness because their condition is too severe. Workplace Strategies for Mental Health says the best way to know the difference between these two is to start by ruling out the thought that it’s a performance concern. Once you’ve done this you’ll want to see if it’s a mental health issue and if so, you’ll want to manage it in a supportive way. Here’s how you can make this happen:
- Communicate without judging or making assumptions about your employees’ behavior. Although these things are a normal part of human behavior, you can make it a point to communicate without letting them dictate or influence the way you respond to your employees.
- Understand and manage the way you react to your employees’ performance and behavior.
- Make sure you’re clear and supportive in communicating with your employees. This is especially important when you know your employee is dealing with chronic stress, depression, burnout, or anxiety.
- Focus more on the outcome you want than on the problem at hand so employees feel less like they’re being criticized and more like they’re collaborating with you to find a solution.
- Highlight your employees’ strengths (e.g. their effort, the value they add to the team, past accomplishments) before pointing out what they need to change.
- Instead of agreeing or disagreeing with your employee, try to show them that you understand their perspective first.
- Engage your employees in developing solutions and building on their strengths.
How to Resolve Performance Issues
When you notice that your employees are exhibiting behavior that seems like misconduct (e.g. being uncharacteristically late, lacking focus, turning in poor quality work, disrespect), don’t give a “knee-jerk” reaction. Instead, as soon as you see changes in your employees’ behavior you should offer your support. While you’re entitled to apply your standard performance management system to everyone, you should take personal circumstances and mental health issues into consideration. This is especially important when your employee discloses a mental health issue to you. At these times, HCA Mag says you should leave performance management to the last resort so you don’t exacerbate their stress and anxiety level. This is something that many times get overlooked when employees are dismissed for all the wrong reasons.
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Maintaining Transparent Communication
Instead of letting employees feel passed over when it comes to promotions, you should help them understand what you’re looking for. It’s important for employees to understand this process so they don’t see it as being unfair. This will also help them be healthier mentally because they’ll have goals to work towards so they can get a promotion too. Transparency will help make the workplace’s mental atmosphere better by reducing stress.
Providing Seminars and Workshops
Consider bringing in some experts who can help you open up the lines of communication and strengthen positive social connections in your workplace. By encouraging empathy in your workplace conference speakers will help you and your managers develop personals strategies that’ll help maintain and improve employees’ mental well-being. This is done by creating a supportive environment there.
Creating a Positive Team Culture
It’s important for employees to be rewarded and recognized for a job well done. This helps them feel rewarded and recognized – two things that encourage them to continue their great performance. The reason this works so well is rewards and recognition are powerful motivators that are associated with lots of positive emotions (e.g. satisfaction, confidence, value). It can be as simple as telling your employee that they’ve done a great job – something that will cost you nothing but motivate your employee to keep up the good work nonetheless.
Increasing Manager Competency
There are three main things a competent manager does. These include:
- Creating jobs that offer both flexibility and autonomy – things everyone wants from their job today since it takes away a lot of stress from their lives. Adding programs to this to help your employees with career growth will also make them healthier and happier.
- Providing help to your employees for their mental health issues is also important. This should include things like a regular mental health assessment, exercise program, nutritious food in the break room, and safety policies being implemented throughout the workplace. Implementing these things will make employees feel more secure, which result in them being healthier, happier, and more productive.
- Facilitating both professional and personal relationships with coworkers will help people feel less lonely, which can improve their mental health.
- Involving employees in the decision-making process helps them feel like participants and gives them some sense of control. It also helps them achieve a healthy work-life balance.
The Importance of Recognition and Reward
Today about 36% of executives, 43% of mid-level employees, and 45% of frontline employees feel that people with their skill sets aren’t being fairly recognized while people with fewer skills or experience receive greater recognition. A great way to help reduce your employees’ stress is to pay them a fair wage. It’s also important for everyone to understand why and how promotions and pay raise work. When these things happen, people see the workplace as being fairer.
Conclusion
Now that you see how easy these tips are to enact and why it’s so important for you to do so, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t take a moment to start enacting them immediately. While you may not notice a major difference in your workplace right away, the day will come when you’ll notice the difference and be glad you’ve heeded these tips. Until then, hang in there and keep plugging away at making your employees feel happier and be healthier while they’re working for you. Doing so will truly enrich your business.