The bottom line, if you make a mental health benefit available, and then culturally reward the people who never take any time to use it, the app will not get used by the people who most need it. Your culture matters much more than your benefits package.
To borrow from Cris Carter, “Come On Man!” Actually, it’s easy to blame some lazy IT folks for not disabling accounts, but I’d be willing to bet that quite a few of these are actually some third party app, or service, that the company uses, and doesn’t have a good procedure to sync up terminated…
I’m glad to see companies seeing this as an issue for themselves, and not just an “outside of work” thing. On the other hand, when we talk about it in these terms, I think I can see part of the reason that there is still so much stigma attached to the idea of getting help for mental health issues.
This is mind-blowing:
“The Monster report suggests that 93% of employees are willing to change industries to find the right job. Monster found that burnout and lack of growth opportunities are driving the shift.”
This is really the big question many of us have, and rightfully so. Hopefully, your workplace is smart enough to encourage you to disconnect during off hours, or take care of your mental health needs, and speak up if you’re feeling burned out. But, what do we do if that same employer also rewards the folks who don’t do any of that? How does an employee keep up healthy boundaries and not get left behind in their career when they watch the peers who work all hours of the day/night, never disconnect, and work in an absolutely non-sustainable way are praised for their “grit and commitment”, and maybe even promoted over folks who work harder at maintaining a sustainable work-life balance?
Most things that I hear managers and CEO’s complain about remote working, like how their team feels disconnected, or suffers from “Zoom fatigue”, or might not be spending every minute of the 9-5 working for the company, are things that should have been true for those of us who worked remotely prior to 2020, but it wasn’t true.
When you design, and manage, for remote work, instead of forcing everyone to be in more meaningless meetings just so you can “see” them, or track their activities every minute of the day, these issues don’t exist.