Why workplace mental health matters and how you can support your people

Working from home – or ‘living at work’ as it is often referred to – comes with its own challenges, isolation, and loss of boundaries between work and home time amongst others. Couple that with load shedding woes, the ever-escalating issue of gender-based violence, the reality that South Africa’s suicide rate is 4x the global average and it becomes strikingly clear that there is a serious issue here. The South African government has declared October National Mental Health Awareness month, but there’s still more to be done.

Against this backdrop, mental health becomes ever more critical and employers who fail to focus on supporting the mental – as well as physical – wellbeing of their employees will suffer the consequences. The true mental health impact of COVID-19 is yet to be understood, but experts are warning that we could face a mental health pandemic in the wake of the stress, anxiety, and depression caused by COVID-19. The cost of lost productivity relating to mental health runs in the billions worldwide annually and those organisations who invest in preventative enablers will thrive with their people. Those who fall behind will no doubt see a rise in absenteeism and presenteeism in the workplace.

By making mental health part of mainstream communications, it can help to breakdown stigmas attached to mental health issues. But, by far the most effective way to enable workplace mental health is through a focus on prevention and early intervention. There are a couple of ways to enable this, which are working for BSG:

1. People

Making sure you have the right people in the right positions to help those who are feeling the pressure is key to enabling workplace mental health programmes. This could come in the form of an internal Industrial Psychologist or simply providing training to managers to make sure they are equipped to signpost those in need to appropriate resources.

One of the ways we enable this at BSG is through Mental Health First Aider training. The training equips our leaders with the skills they need to support their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. In some countries, the certification of mental health first aiders is mandatory, whilst not yet the case in South Africa we are striving to be ahead of the curve in this regard.

2. Enablers [Systems]

There are numerous mental health support providers in the market and the trend is growing rapidly. At BSG, we partner with two such external specialists:

• Unmind is a workplace mental health platform co-founded in 2016 by BSG’s former Wellness Officer, Steve Peralta, in conjunction with clinical psychologist Dr Nick Taylor. The platform offers self-guided programmes and in-the-moment exercises designed to build mindfulness and mental resilience for modern lifestyles. Recently ranked No. 6 in BusinessCloud’s London Tech 50 ranking for 2020.
• ICAS is a registered employee assistance programme provider. The ICAS Employee Health and Wellness Programme provides employees of registered companies, and their immediate dependants, with access to 24/7/365 counselling services in any of the 11 official South African languages. The platform also provides support to managers to ensure they are equipped to support others.

But systems are only as good as the people who use them. This is why it’s critically important to ensure that you have a clear understanding of how your people feel about their mental health. At BSG, we do this through one-on-one check-ins with career facilitators, team leads, or capability leaders. These check-ins offer a qualitative view on the mental health of our people. Qualitative data is important, but where possible quantitative data is needed to understand trends and patterns.

3. Data

To better understand how our people were coping with COVID-19 and the work from home reality, we began gathering quantitative data via team leads. Initially, this was as simple as asking people to rate how they were feeling on a scale of 1-10. Over time, we began developing our own app – called MapMyMood – that enabled people to capture their own mood ratings as well as verbatim feedback. Individual mood ratings and feedback are available to career facilitators and BSG’s Manco team. People can also choose to submit anonymous feedback. The app enables people to track their mood over time and empowers BSG’s leadership team to constantly bring about positive change.