Link – Managers feel ill-equipped to support staff mental health
To be honest, I’m surprised it’s this high, and wonder how many of these managers are deluding themselves?
“Only 31% of line managers polled by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) and publication Management Today considered they had been sufficiently trained to recognise the signs of mental ill health in their staff, indicating that organisations are not being proactive enough in tackling an issue that contributes to lost productivity and increased absence.”
Later, the article talks about the employee side of things, where 80% fear talking about their mental health in the workplace due to being stigmatized, or viewed negatively in terms of their abilities to do their job.
This is just a sad state of affairs. It’s no wonder we have so many professions facing epidemics of mental health and addiction issues. We spend so much of our lives working, yet it’s also the one place we have to hide our struggles because they are simply not understood at all, by management or coworkers.
The answer is not simply pointing people to an EAP (Employee Assistance Program), and hoping for the best. Employees deserve more than the bare minimum, human beings deserve more than the bare minimum. But that seems to be all the care management can muster, if they even bother with that.
If you can’t be bothered to care for your employees, at least consider the costs of lost productivity and turnover caused by mental health issues and what you can do about that by offering more. It’s in your interest too.
