The Connection Diaries, Ep. 12: How do we address mental health & well-being at work?

Over the past few months, we’ve been hearing more and more about the increasing concern for well-being and mental health in the time of COVID-19. Massive changes in our personal and work lives have all kinds of systems stressed, revealing their capacity to cope with that stress and bringing up new questions about how we take care of our businesses, our people and ourselves.

We’re hearing the same concerns from leaders all around the world:

• “Now that reality is setting in, my team is exhausted and overwhelmed. How do I help sustain the energy and health of my people?”
• “The Zoom happy hours were great in the beginning, but I’m noticing people becoming less engaged and pulling away now that the novelty has worn off. How do I keep everyone connected?”
• “As a leader, there’s so much pressure to be a reliable source of honesty and hope, and balancing that has been a real challenge. I have the responsibility to set the tone for the organization, but I’m struggling with overwhelm and fatigue myself. Sharing that vulnerability feels risky, like it could do damage to morale or to my own credibility, or both.”
• “We’re seeing a huge divergence in personal circumstances, from physical space to family responsibilities and social isolation, so everyone is coping differently. How can we provide support when individual needs seem to be so varied?”
• “Work is no longer a place we go, it’s what we do every day. When we can’t have that physical interaction in the office, how do we sustain our culture virtually?”

These challenges all seem to point to a topic many are considering with new significance: What is the relationship between personal health and organizational health? Are there ways we can take care of both things at the same time?

Evelyn Jonkman and Emma Rose Connolly joined Robin Anselmi to share what they’ve been noticing about the rising importance of well-being at work. They discuss how those challenges relate to the quality of connection and conversation in our organizations, hypothesizing that the principles for fostering workplace vitality are the same ones that impact our individual and collective health.

They also suggest that this time offers us a great opportunity to stay awake to the signals revealing how well our systems respond to these stressors. Armed with this information, we can build more resilient systems and processes moving forward that support personal and social health, as well as the performance of our businesses.

If you’re facing these challenges right now, we would love to hear from you. What questions are you wrestling with? Is there anything you’d love advice from other leaders on how to handle? What have your organizations been doing that’s working well? Comment below or connect with us on LinkedIn! Let’s unleash our collective brilliance.