Mental health plays an important part in workplace productivity, employee retention, quality of work, and company profit.
Workers with a positive mindset and balanced mood contribute more than their peers who struggle with low mood, lack of motivation, and high stress.
Employers can improve the potential for long-term success in their company by ensuring workers have access to comprehensive mental health care, flex-time options, sufficient downtime, and a healthy workplace environment.
Here are some ways companies can help improve overall mental health in the workplace for enhanced efficiency and success.
Benefits of Good Mental Health
Companies with workers that are happy and engaged see more success on many levels than companies with a toxic workplace culture and disgruntled, over-stressed employees.
Good mental health in the workplace can benefit employers and employees in multiple ways, including the following.
Longer Employee Retention
Training new employees places a strain on a company’s time and budget, and high turnover prevents peer bonding among co-workers. And workers without a strong support system among their peers are more likely to leave a company sooner than employees who feel a connection with workmates.
A lack of focus on workers’ mental well-being can often lead to a toxic workplace environment that causes employees to leave the company in search of a healthier environment.
It’s a vicious cycle, but it can be broken. When employers prioritise good mental health in their employees, a healthy work environment can become the new normal. Workers want to stay in healthy environments, and companies will find that employees stay with the company longer if it’s healthy and welcoming.
Increased Productivity
Focusing on good mental health and a sense of well-being at work can boost workplace productivity tremendously. A balanced mental state combined with plenty of energy, healthy stress levels, and motivation helps workers do much better work in a shorter amount of time with fewer distractions.
Motivated, focused workers contribute immensely to the company’s overall wellbeing, including profitability. The bottom line is that improved workers’ mental health leads to increased productivity.
Improved Work Quality
Whether you offer services or goods, the quality of your offering can vastly improve when companies focus on promoting good mental health in the workplace.
Reduced productivity, disgruntled workers, lack of motivation, and other factors of a toxic workplace environment result in a poor product quality. And whether a company is offering care services or developing the latest smartphone gaming app, a poor product quality can mean the end of your business.
To make sure your company offers the best product it can, focus on improving and maintaining good mental health in the workplace. Happy workers equal better quality outcomes, period.
Popular mental healtH improvements
As more companies recognise the benefits good mental health in the workplace, more improvements are being initiated across industries. Here are some of the most popular solutions being used to improve mental health in workplaces today.
Flex-time
Flex-time is one of the newest buzzwords in professional industries. But what, exactly, is it? Flex-time simply means offering employees a variety of timing options for engaging in company work.
The solution: Let employees choose their own hours and days from a list of optional hours to work or even create their own schedule. Basically, as long as the work gets done on time, employees and contractors can do the work at any time they choose.
Location options
Over the past couple of years, some employees have realised they prefer working from home. Zero commutes, money saved on fuel, the ability to be more flexible with family needs, and other factors became a part of their personal work culture.
But other workers missed the camaraderie among co-workers, water-cooler banter, and the comfort of having other people around for much of the day.
Since promoting good mental health in the workplace isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, many savvy employers have acknowledged the need to provide location options for employees to ensure the best outcomes for the company and the employees.
The solution: Offer a choice. Remote work has become a necessity during the last two years for safety reasons. But many companies and workers found they were more productive working from home. Now, some employers are offering workers a choice to work from home, come into the office, or hybrid options that include the best of both.
Mental Health Benefits
Traditional company health care plans may not include mental health care in their list of compensated services. If mental health resources are covered, they may be limited in scope and frequency.
Providing a wide range of mental health resources and services in company health care coverage plans takes a crucial step toward improving mental health in the workplace.
When workers have better access to mental health resources, they can cope with workplace stress and potential conflicts with more grace and ease.
The solution: offer a comprehensive health care plan that covers mental health services like counseling, talk therapy, pilates, mindfulness meditations, natural medicine, preventive health, etc. For this option to be most effective, the plan must be affordable for employees and their families. Prohibitive costs can defeat your purpose by causing more stress and anxiety, leading to reduced mental health.
Things to try
Here are some ideas to help you promote mental health in the workplace from Forbes Agency Council.
- Host mental health forums. You’ve probably had experts in to train your sales team, or talk about important topics like saving for retirement. Why not do the same for mental health? Ask your team members to share a mental health strategy that they learned about or use themselves, whether it’s making time for meditation or practicing mindfulness.
- Try a mental health challenge. Plenty of offices have fitness challenges where teams can win prizes for staying fit and healthy. Set an attainable mental health goal for the whole team. It could be that everyone takes their entire lunch and breaks for the month. It could be that everyone spends 30 minutes every week with a meditation app. Award a prize to everyone who achieves the goal, whether it’s a group pizza party or a donation to a charity of the team’s choice.
- Be flexible. Above all, Forbes recommends being flexible, whether it’s with time off, personal days, or anything else your employees need to do their best work. Being a stickler about an employee using one extra day of vacation to deal with a family emergency or leaving an hour early to attend a therapy session sends the message that the clock matters more than their wellbeing. And as we’ve seen with the Great Resignation, that belief could cost you in the end.
Following these mental health tips can help you keep your best talent. And in turn, your employees will benefit from better mental health which will result in less burnout and improved productivity. It’s a win-win.
Author: Patrick Bailey – Professional Writer
