Businesses must prioritise employee’s mental health

With it being Mental Health Awareness Week, firms are being encouraged to take the time to check in on their workers and make sure that they are doing okay.

With the pandemic taking its toll on so many people’s lives, we are potentially facing a mental health pandemic as a direct result.

The situation for many employees is that they have been working remotely for the last 18 months, will potentially continue to do so for a while longer, and have reached a point where work and home life has merged into one.

AMS believes that businesses will experience a ‘long-lasting, detrimental impact on growth prospects’ if they don’t take care of their employee’s mental health, and so recommend the following steps that will help to achieve this:

• Make time to talk: Don’t be afraid to have difficult and courageous conversations across the business – in fact, make time to discuss the pressures peers and teams are facing. People need to be listened to, no matter how hard it can be to hear it.
• Focus on humility: Use good role models in senior positions who are able to talk about mental well-being with a sense of vulnerability and humility. Opening up a conversation that encourages people to talk – including sharing personal experiences from managers – will be crucial in helping staff cope in the modern world.
• Get your people involved: Empower staff to take action themselves. AMS champions Mental Health Ambassadors across the company who are accessible to anyone looking to talk about their struggles in and out of work.

• Train your managers to have empowering conversations: Managers are facing a new challenge themselves. Providing training to help them have impactful discussions delivered with confidence and compassion can help tackle the mental health pandemic.
• Take a global viewpoint with a regional approach: Be considerate about the fact that there are regional differences in terms of pandemic restrictions, so the mental health support needed will vary across geographies.

Ruth Smyth, Managing Director, People and Culture at AMS, said, “Our employees’ mental health has never faced such pressure and strain as it has in the last year. While there’s been some really encouraging and inspirational moves from employers to support the mental well-being of their staff during the pandemic, we’re now facing longer-term stresses that businesses need to prepare for – in particular, the effects of long-Covid and a possible mental health pandemic that could impact our people for a number of years unless we prepare and take action quickly.

“While every business will have its own talent engagement and mental health well-being programme in place, impactful, courageous and difficult conversations need to embraced if we’re to support our talent in the new world of work. Making time to talk now could safe-guard the well-being of our people in the future.”

To find out more about contracting please contact Jaime on 01442 795 100 or email jaime.thorpe@dolanaccountancy.com.