Linked – Four actions leaders can take to boost employee mental health
Psychological safety in your workplace environment cannot be achieved without training your managers on mental health.
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Linked – Are employees getting enough mental health support in 2024?
However, what I want to talk about is the 46% of employees who are not “confident that employers care at least moderately about their mental health.”
That’s a lot of employees at risk of leaving. After all, why continue to work for an employer who doesn’t appear to care about you? Consider the wording of that survey; they only asked if you feel confident that your employer moderately cares. Not that they care deeply. Not that you feel important to them, just whether there is evidence that you moderately care about their mental health. How much effort does it take to show that you care just a little? Yet almost half of employees don’t see it from their employers.
That’s a shame. The improvement is nice, but there’s a long way to go on this
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Linked – Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes
Well-being programs place the responsibility for managing employee mental health in the hands of the employees, who have no power to change the things causing the problem.
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Linked – Changing the eDiscovery Burnout Blueprint: Practical Solutions to Address Failing Mental Wellness in the eDiscovery Industry
It’s great that someone is putting it all in writing with research. Still, until the collective response to our stories about dropping out of a wedding to pop open our laptop is “that’s not acceptable,” we will have this issue. We should reconsider the tales of all-nighters, working from vacations, and extraordinary efforts to get eDiscovery work done in time. Instead of wearing them like badges of honor, we should think of them as exploitation. What else would you call the expectation that you are available to respond 24/7, and when you sacrifice much of your personal and family life to meet that expectation, you are rewarded with a 2% raise at the end of the year?
Because as long as that is the job, mental health is going to be an issue.
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Linked – Time to Talk About Emotional Labor
Words about your workplace’s great culture ring hollow when team members regularly find themselves putting up with jerks. That’s not a great culture. That’s extra emotional labor—labor that likely doesn’t come close to matching what they are paid.
We don’t talk about this in terms of emotional labor. We talk about being resilient, staying composed, etc. We don’t talk about how exhausting it is to know that every day at work, someone is likely to yell at you, let alone know that when it happens, there will be no solution to prevent it from happening again. If they take the time to complain and ask for a solution, they’ll be told it’s “just part of the job.”
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Linked – Here’s how to celebrate World Mental Health Day 2024
I’m sure there are some CEOs out there who read that and think we’re supposed to be drained and used up. That just shows how dedicated we are to our work. That ignores the fact that work is only part of our lives. They ignore the damage that does to society when we have adults who are uninvolved with their kids’ lives, disconnected from their community, uninformed about what is happening in the world, and lacking many meaningful friendships because work requires them to have nothing left to give to those endeavors.
That’s why having a workplace that accounts for those impacts on employees’ lives is so important.
