Mental Health & 3 ways to improve your work life blend
How can mental health be helped at work?
First of all, it is really important to understand that there is no difference between physical health and mental health…. both are crucial for an employee or any human being!
HR is often seen as being the group that protects the employer by ensuring that employees don’t sue or cause a fuss. Having worked in HR my whole career, this is 99% incorrect (an arbitrary figure based on the fact that I have come across some malevolent individuals in HR who are out for themselves and protecting the big boss from being taken to court), however, the vast majority of people in HR and Recruitment are there because they like people and want to help people, you and I are probably one of these people.
If someone breaks their leg or has a bad cold, the business will normally insist that the individual looks after themselves, by working from home or at least making themselves more comfortable while at work. The same is not said for mental health. If someone is “a little down” or “a bit stressed” or “has a lot
on their plate or their mind” it is often ignored and treated as a standard part of life and the inference is “suck it up” or as the horrendous individual Piers Morgan said when speaking about men’s mental health “man up”. I am “man enough” to admit that I have been “a bit stressed, a little down, and had a lot on my plate, a lot on my mind” many times, who doesn’t in this day and age of debt, pressure, social media intrusion and 24/7 work access. I remember when my little girl didn’t sleep for 16months… not one night did she sleep through, she screamed from 6pm-1am every night and would then sleep in our bed waking every few hours to scream in my face! Nightmare! 
A few times I understood what Abraham was up to….”errrr God told me to do it” the poor bloke hadn’t slept for 16months. Jokes aside, after a few months of this and sleeping only a few hours a night, my physical and mental fragility started to show. I had a fantastic manager who understood my position and allowed me the flexibility to work from home to recover now and then.
By allowing me to work from home, it gave me an extra few hours in bed and allowed me to work the hours that I needed to do at the times that i wanted to do. I was measured on output not on being at my desk. I in turn passed this benefit onto my team, a few of whom had “a lot on their plate” and it helped them immensely deal with those issues/demons and improve their mental health.
So how can we all be understanding employers and managers?
Reduce work load and stop overworking employees:
- Staying late at work (If people are having to work longer than 8-9 hours a day something is going wrong)
- Long shifts
- Too much overtime
- Pressure on individuals rather than a team outcome
- Pressure on managers who pass that pressure onto their teams
- Inefficient processes and wasted effort and time
If any of the above is too extreme it will increase stress and burn people out which will lead to mental health issues which can then lead to confidence and decision making problems. These symptoms then spill into the personal and family life.
If people are staying late and are having to work weekends something has gone wrong; poor planning, not enough resources, no mitigation, or poor processes and too much rework. All of this can be easily improved with 3 workshops
a) Voice of the Customer – build your process around what your customer actually wants, if they aren’t willing to pay for it, it doesn’t add value and it isn’t a business requirement (i.e. legal)….get rid of it
b) Waste Stripping workshop – spend time speaking to the guys in the trenches and strip the waste and pointless tasks out of your process. In my last project i managed to remove 25% of wasted time….. thats 2 hours a day!
c) Metrics – make sure that you measure output and understand where the bottlenecks are. Analyse the problems and fix them!
Break from the daily grind:
Its important for people’s mental health to go out and reconnect with the world, look at the trees, blue sky and take a deep breath.
- Encourage employees to take breaks, go for a coffee or a walk.
- Go out for lunch and not to eat at their desks, if they bring their own lunch, walk over the local park and eat the sandwiches.
- Exercise, get to the gym go for a run, anything to break up the day.
Encourage a work life blend…. not a balance:
We spend most of our life at work, it is an integral part of our life, therefore we need to ensure that it blends with our family and personal goals. It is not a balance, they are not diametrically opposed, they are entwined. I wrote in by blog about being a dad and work life blend and how it became crucial to me and my family and resulted in me becoming self employed.
- Move your business to being more output focused and not tied to a desk; don’t focus on hours worked
- Work from home, work from a cafe or park… it will probably reduce your business overheads anyway.
- Remember that people change over time, check in on them
Im 35 now, and am a very different person to who i was 7 years ago and a totally different person to who i was when i was 21. Managers need to check in with staff (especially when people are going through difficult periods, moving house, kids, illness, all mental health triggers). When I worked in Australia, we had an “are you ok day” which was a great program aimed at checking in with our colleagues in an unthreatening way that meant people could talk without feeling political and career repercussions.
If you can’t improve one of the above, at least remember to ask R U OK?
