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.
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.
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.
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.
Could you do something for me? The next time you try to schedule a thirty-minute meeting with someone and see a thirty-minute break between long stretches of committed time, leave that time for them. Find a different time, if possible. Or go even further and commit to finding a time not immediately before or after another meeting. Let people have a few minutes. It’s good for all of our mental health.
If you were burned out, overworked, and struggling to keep up with the demands of the job, and a tool promised to save you 30 minutes or more to get your work done, you’d figure out how to use it, too.
Of course, most of them are trying to use these tools without training and instruction from the company, so this is risky. One, because you have no idea what they are doing and what results they’re getting. Two, they might become even more burned out trying to teach themselves before they get to the part where it helps them save time.