Mental Wellbeing and Hybrid Working
This blog focusses on mental wellbeing at work. This first part looks at how employers can support their employees with maintaining positive mental health while hybrid working. The second part of this blog can be found here and has a focus on financial wellbeing, which can have a significant effect on people’s mental wellbeing.
How Can Employers Improve Mental Wellbeing for Hybrid and Home Working Employees?
Since the Covid pandemic, many social sector organisations have retained some elements of flexible working which were implemented during Government imposed restrictions, the most common being hybrid working where employees work partly from the workplace and partly from home. Where this model suits your business needs this can be a great way of allowing people to enjoy advantages of homeworking, while at the same time being in the workplace in regular intervals to ensure team cohesion.
45% of people surveyed by the Royal Society for Public Health found that their mental health improved because of homeworking. However, 29% of people in the same study said that homeworking caused a decline in their mental health. There are multiple causes for this, including a loss of connection between colleagues, lack of a dedicated home office, reduced exercise, and an inability to switch off from work. During the pandemic, a poll of 3000 people by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that nearly 50% of people longed for office time due to feelings of loneliness.
These issues are not just the employee’s problem, especially if they are caused or exacerbated by working practices, employees who suffer from poor mental health are typically less engaged, less productive, and less motivated to do their role well, potentially impacting on your service delivery.
Hybrid working, where appropriate, can be a good option solving the social issue to a large degree. However, both home and hybrid working remain a mixed bag of positive and negative effects.
How Can Employers Improve Mental Wellbeing for Hybrid and Home Working Employees?
The negative effects for hybrid or remote working can be mitigated with a bit of work, so here are 3 things you can do to help those working from home, even on a hybrid model.
1) Keep regular contact with your team
This sounds obvious, but as most of us know, contact points are reduced when we are not working in the same building. To tackle the loneliness and a lack of social interaction, it is important that we find suitable alternatives. Options may be available le such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom etc which allows for managers and employees to stay in touch via chat and video call.
Make sure to have a regular schedule of team meetings, particularly on days when employees will be in the workplace, to ensure that colleagues have contact with each other. Where meetings are digital, a meaningful and effective tactic is to start the meeting with a question that is not work related but is meant to start a social conversation for 5-10 minutes to stimulate staff and release those dopamine and serotonin to ensure colleagues feel happy and are attentive for the remainder of the meeting.
2) Encourage people to follow a routine when working from home
Encourage employees to set a routine and stick to their working hours to maintain a work/life balance. Studies by Microsoft found that people working from home were logged in for longer and did more evening work, indicating that the border between work and life is increasingly blurred when working from home.
If employees cannot shut off from work it can have serious consequences on their stress levels. By setting clear parameters you are not restricting staff but supporting them to look after their own mental health.
Breaks are equally important but are often a victim of home working. Employees working from home are more likely to continue to work without having proper breaks and not leaving the house. Encourage people to take a walk outside or sit in their garden during dedicated breaks. An effective way of doing this is by setting up a channel in your Teams or Slack account and ask people to share pictures from the outside (such as Autumn colours).
3) Promote healthy living
Unlike a workplace kitchen, which is often sparsely stocked with instant coffee and the odd biscuit, the home kitchen is often fully stocked with food and drinks providing the opportunity to have a quick snack or an extra coffee. Add that to the reduction in exercise and you have a perfect recipe for a decline in physical. Poor physical health can have an impact on the ability to concentrate and work, but worse, can affect someone’s mental health in the long term.
Although employers cannot tell people how to live, you could encourage employees to take more regular exercise. For those employers who want to be creative, you could organise Pilates or Yoga events over Zoom/Teams where employees can opt in to join an instructor for a few minutes each week to get some movement in their bodies (and clear the mind if you can include mindfulness).
To conclude, home and hybrid working are great options as they provide many benefits to both employee and employer. However, it must be well managed to ensure that the benefits can be reaped.
The following resources may assist you in helping employees where there may be issues with poor or declining mental health. Employers should remember that they are in most cases not medical experts, so if you do get stuck or do not know what to do, you could refer the employee to an Occupational Health provider to seek medical advice on how you can support the employee.
Mind Wellness Action Plan for Employers – https://www.mind.org.uk/media-a/5761/mind-guide-for-line-managers-wellness-action-plans_final.pdf
Mind Wellness Action Plan for Employees – https://www.mind.org.uk/media-a/5760/mind-guide-for-employees-wellness-action-plans_final.pdf
Mental Health at Work – https://www.mentalhealthatwork.org.uk/
Acas guide on supporting mental health at work – https://www.mentalhealthatwork.org.uk/
HSE guide on dealing with stress (free tool for up to 50 employees) – https://books.hse.gov.uk/article/654091/Stress-Indicator-Tool/Free-Stress-Indicator-Tool
