In our increasingly instant gratification, IT savvy, ‘buy with one swipe’ seeking world, quick fixes have long been all the rage.
LOSE 7lbs IN 7 DAYS!
5 QUICK FIXES TO IMPROVE MENTAL CLARITY
OVERCOME DEPRESSION IN 6 WEEKS
ZAP THAT ANXIETY & LIVE A FULLER LIFE
– All promises that jumped out at me during a two minute scroll through Google search.
If only it were that easy!
Think how much smoother your business would run if you could completely eradicate all employee mental health issues in just a couple of days.
Absenteeism would drop right off. Presenteeism would be all but eliminated. Your staff would be consistently productive and engaged with no distractions.
Unfortunately we live in the real world, where life happens. Outside of your four walls (or indeed the outside edges of the Zoom screen if your staff are WFH), every single individual is coping with concerns and worries and issues and relationships and distractions and anxieties and sadnesses – all of which exist in a world which has nothing to do with your business.
Yet they affect your business.
And if that individual is trying to protect your business, and their job, by keeping it all quiet and tucked away, the emotional ramifications down the line may be magnified unnecessarily – both for your business and their mental health.
There are no quick fixes for mental health, because mental health is an undeniable part of every day life for every single person.
It is not one out of four that have mental health issues, it’s four out of four. To have emotions is to be human. What differentiates us is each indivudal’s ability to recognise and react to those emotions in a proactive, helpful way, rather than a reactive, unhelpful way.
And this can be learnt.
Caring for the mental wellbeing of your staff, whether they are on the factory floor, working from home, out on the roads, up ladders, in the kitchens, in the boardroom, on the production line, in the back offices, should be weaved into the very fabric of your business culture – encouraging a collaborative approach that is accessible to all, no matter their position or role.
Changing the way we talk about mental health is fundamental to helping every single individual better understand their own emotional wellbeing, and gain greater power over it.
Wrapping it up in complex diagnostic terms, hiding behind pharmaceutically driven responses, will perpetuate the stigma and disempower the very people that need the most help.
Taking a long term, pragmatic approach, changing thinking through accessible educative means, engendering an environment in which emotional intelligence is an intrinsic part of your company culture, will all help to improve the overal emotional wellbeing of your employees.
Keeping proactive support in place – making emotional awareness a visible and acceptable part of the every day – these are collectively all actions that will help every single staff member within your organisation.
You won’t catch everyone. Sometimes people don’t want to be caught. But you’d make the holes in the net significantly smaller. Not only will less people slip through, but the overall productivity and engagement levels of your workforce will increase incrementally as a result.