How To Take Care Of Your Employees' Mental Health

January 12 2018 - While you may already have some strategies for dealing with stress in your workplace, it's good practice to continually monitor how well these are working, and whether or not you can do more to ensure that any stressors in the office environment are kept to a minimum. Stress in the workplace is inevitable but its effects can be countered if you have the right processes in place. It's often very difficult to keep tabs on how your employees are feeling without regular communication and so workplace surveys are key to helping get the balance just right.

What Is The Real Effect Of Stress On Employees?

According to the National Alliance On Mental Illness, 83% of Americans reported that they were under stress in the workplace. A person's mental health affects absolutely everything that they do and persistent, long-term stress undoubtedly has a hugely detrimental effect on an individual's emotional well being. Changes in the workplace such as a reduction in workload and an opportunity to voice concerns can greatly reduce the effect of stress on an employee's performance.

Prevention Is Better Than Cure

When the brain's stress response is triggered, the body automatically releases the chemicals cortisol and norepinephrine. In turn this compromises the functionality of the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for high level thinking that is needed in the workplace, particularly for demanding job roles. The chemical changes that occur in the brain as the result of stress can lead to serious mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety that have an adverse effect on an employee's productivity and functionality. If you can effectively reduce stress levels among your employees then you will be preventing potential mental health problems within your workforce, which is a much lengthier and more difficult problem to tackle than just stress alone.

What Can You Do In Your Workplace?

Workplace communication is often all that is needed to create a stress free work environment. Particularly in fast-paced environments, employees don't feel like they have the time they need to voice any concerns about impossible task lists or exhausting schedules. In this scenario, employees are quickly going to feel out of control of their work life which is where problems start to arise. The American Institute of Stress reports that 46% of Americans cite workload as their main workplace stressor.

While things like company incentives and away days are usually the first port of call when trying to boost employee morale, it's often more effective to tackle the root cause of workplace dissatisfaction which nearly always comes down to the size of an employee's workload.

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