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Linked: Employers Grapple with Surge in Mental Health Issues
Having HR professionals understand this is important. Having them try to influence the business leaders might help too. At the end of the day, though, this only gets better if the entire culture buys into it. Any individual manager who isn’t capable of making reasonable accommodations because they haven’t been trained or because the actual business practices create a roadblock for them only proves that this is all just talk.
People who’ve struggled for years to continue working at the risk of their mental health deserve a lot more than talk.
Linked: Nearly half of employees received no wellbeing check-in last year, research reveals
You cannot claim to care about the people who work for you, and not even check in on their well-being. Those two things do not go together at all. We have to get to that very minimum level before we can do more, and if we can’t even be bothered to get there, I see no reason why anyone with a choice would want to continue working for you.
Do Layoffs Fix Anything, or Do We Have Them Because Everyone Else is Doing It?
Take a hard look at what leaders are saying about layoffs and what they focus on. Do they seem personally hurt and concerned for the people leaving? Do they have honest and transparent explanations for why they made these decisions? Or do they repeat platitudes about “recession,” costs, and other bits of financial jargon to explain away something so painful to the same people they were calling part of the family a week ago?
Families don’t cut the number of kids when money gets tight. Your workplace is not a family and does not deserve a level of commitment that matches your family or your health. Layoffs are sometimes necessary, but mostly just a nice tool to perk up the value of a company for a specific part of the structure or to make up for mistakes made by the same people making these job cuts.
That’s business. I’ve argued for years that business has a vested interest in employee well-being. Caring about your people is how you get their best. I hope leaders will continue to grow in that regard, but as an individual employee, you need to care about yourself more. If your job isn’t meeting your career needs in terms of money, development, or work-life balance, find a better one. You owe them nothing. They pay you to do a job until they decide not to. You owe them that work.
That is all.
