Have you implemented a program to look after your employee’s mental health?
Now more than ever it’s important to look after your team’s wellbeing, their emotional aspects, the anxiety the current situation could pose to individuals in your team, the fear, the stress at all levels within an organisation.
From a health and safety perspective here’s the important things you could do right now for your employees:
✔ Have a clear policy in place for how your organisation deals with mental health and update it to reflect pandemic related challenges.
✔ Encourage people to participate in mental health care with their team so they feel equipped to ask and listen to ‘how are you?’ (peer to peer).
✔ Have team sessions using video conferencing so you can see reactions.
✔ Make sure your team have a safe way to raise an issue whether they are at home OR in the workplace.
✔ Look at deploying programs that help people with mental health issues or just great wellbeing initiatives like team social time (laughter helps everyone!).
✔ Use the 2m distance rule in a safe space to take off masks so you can both read each others faces.
✔ Have drop in sessions where people can ask questions to help ease anxieties or concerns (include the ones on Furlough).
✔ Monitor absences for mental health issues and address any patterns that arise to make things better for your employees.
✔ Give employees the chance to say home working is tough and their pattern needs adjusting to cope with things like homeschooling (in the current COVID conditions)
There’s lots of places to get more tips on mental health in the workplace including:
www.mentalhealth.org.uk
https://www.mind.org.uk/workplace/mental-health-at-work/
https://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/mental-health.htm
