How to support the long-term mental health effects of Covid-19
Get to know your people
To enable your business to create a wellbeing strategy that will provide the right support and develop an inclusive culture that will support employees suffering the ongoing impact of Covid-19, it’s essential to understand your employees and their diverse needs. Providing regular opportunities for feedback will enable you to get a solid grasp of what matters to them and shape your strategy with meaningful solutions and support in response.
Creating benchmarks from this data and taking the time to regularly collect further feedback from your employees will enable you to measure success and ensure your proposition maintains momentum.
Involve leadership
As with all projects, with the support of key leaders within the organisation your activities are more likely to succeed. They should be engaged early, and the benefits of an effective mental health campaign should be explained to them. Highlighting the potential for a reduction in missed sick days for example may be key to garnering this support.
Most significantly, leaders must ‘walk the walk’, backing up their support to a mental health campaign with appropriate resources.
Reaching out to your leadership to share their own stories will help to highlight their investment in wellbeing, as well as sowing the seeds of an inclusive and open culture within your workplace. Sharing home-related issues can be daunting for your people as they may be concerned that this will impact their career negatively. Including leadership in these activities will help to alleviate these concerns and increase the chances of your people reaching out for the support they need.
Provide the right training and tools
It’s encouraging to see that 67% of businesses report that line managers are bought in to the importance of wellbeing, up from 58% last year. Management are often the first people employees will go to in order to raise issues or seek support, so providing the right training to support them with difficult conversations or the knowledge of the services available for people to turn to is vital.
Additional support in the form of mental health first aid training can go a long way too. Employees at any level can receive this training to spot the signs of someone who may be struggling, as well as signpost to services and advice. Communicating the availability of mental health first aiders can also help employees feel more secure in seeking assistance.
Align success with business objectives
The most obvious way to measure the success of your communications is by tracking the take-up of your benefits and initiatives. But other measures such as sickness and absence figures, employee engagement, productivity and staff turnover will give powerful data to support further campaigns.
It’s also important to be aware that some figures may appear to go the wrong way. This may happen if you’re running a mental health campaign where you might see an initial spike in claims and absence as employees feel more confident to admit a mental health issue.
Looking ahead
Covid-19 is still a relevant issue and the impact it has had on our employees will remain for the foreseeable future. Changes in the way we work, finances and how we access support have been changed drastically for many over the past 18 months.
By creating and open, inclusive and supportive culture we can ask our employees what support they require and what issues they may be currently facing, which in turn will enable us to offer relevant support and tools.
Taking the time to regularly review these activities and gather feedback from employees will enable businesses to measure success and identify any ongoing trends that need tackling, whilst understanding the impact this has had on business performance.
This article is provided by Simplyhealth.
In partnership with Simplyhealth
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