Linked: 1 in 3 Employees Might Quit “for the Sake of My Mental Health,” Survey Shows

The headline might not be news to many of my regular readers, but I also wanted to share this bit from the article below. I write a lot about poor management so I also wanted to point out that often we ask line managers to do the impossible, and this is one example:

Most managers–71 percent–said they’d been asked to do more than ever to support their employees over the past year. But most said those greater demands didn’t come with any additional support.

Meantime, when asked to describe their company’s mental health strategies, many company leaders explained that their strategy was to have the line managers take care of it. “Top management asks managers about their employees’ mental health on a regular basis,” one C-level executive responded.

This is a real problem, our C-Level folks think they are addressing the issues of burnout, mental health, etc. because they’ve adopted an employee assistance program and instructed their people managers to be concerned about mental health issues, but they’ve not actually given them any training in how to do that. That’s a real problem and puts those managers in a real bind. How do they support the people who report to them, when no one has taught them appropriate ways to do that?

If you read further in the article you’ll see that many managers don’t believe it’s their job, but an HR responsibility, because the managers don’t really even know what resources are available, that’s what HR is for.

I would argue that it’s both and that the real failure here is not communicating two things, the expectation of what “supporting” the people who report to you means, and HR not making it clear what the resources are to their managers.

In the meantime, while your managers and your HR folks point the finger at each other, your best employees, are looking for something else. That’s not a recipe for success.

https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/employees-mental-health-resignation-quitting-leaving-burnout.html

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