5 Ways You Can Support Your Employee's Mental Health

It’s so important for any business owner that they have employees who are coming to work every day feeling good about the work they are doing. The people working for you aren’t just your employees; they’re people, and they have lives outside of your business to run. Supporting the mental health of your employees should be one of the most important considerations when you are thinking about the best ways to manage your staff. The better you can support people, the more they will be willing to stay with you and be loyal to your brand.

Mental health isn’t a joke, and whether you are considering asking your human resources team to put a plan together to ensure your employees are happy, or you want to bring on Peter Sandhill for life coaching purposes for each member of the team, you need to know how to do this. Supporting your employee’s mental health is going to make a big difference to their performance, and your profitability and reputation as a result. So, with this in mind, here are some of the most important ways that you can support employee mental health at work.

Ask. The best way to support your staff is to ask what they need. What one member of staff will need wll differ from another, and the more you understand about the people working for you, the better. If you can be candid with your staff and help them to better understand what you can offer, the happier they will be. People who work for you should be able to feel as if they can come to you for help and advice, and if you ask them what they will need the most, they’ll give you all the answers and pathways to help them that you need.
Resources. Identifying the local resources that you can utilize to ensure that you support the mental health of others is important. If you offer your employees health insurance, make sure that it covers counseling or mental health support in their local area. You can even offer duvet days in the workplace. These are three or four days in the year – paid – that your staff can take at any time, no questions asked. These days are on offer as they need them, and it’s often the lifeline people need to know that they have your support.
Self Care. Policies in the workplace that include self-care should be open to your employees to learn about. Encourage your staff to get away from their desks to eat and make sure that no one touches work on the weekends. If you do things like this, people are going to be more inclined to feel happier at work as they know that they have you supporting them.
Workloads. It’s important that – as an employer – you stay on top of how much work your employees are actually doing. This means ensuring that you are monitoring when they are doing too much, rather than too little. When your employees are overloaded, they don’t work well. It’s not a good idea to give your team too much work, as all that will do is bury them in a load of stress that they can’t get back out of.Create Culture. You want everyone in your business to feel safe, able to ask questions, able to discuss issues and feel safe. Every single business is different, so work out what will work for your business and go from there!