8 Ways Managers Can Support Employees’ Mental Health

Uncertainty breeds anxiety, and we are living in uncertain times. Between rising numbers of Covid-19 cases, questions about whether or not to reopen economies and businesses, the ongoing protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and the economic fallout of the pandemic, we don’t know what will come next. And that’s taking a toll on our mental health, including at work.

We saw an impact early in the pandemic. At the end of March and in early April, our nonprofit organization, Mind Share Partners, conducted a study of global employees in partnership with Qualtrics and SAP. We found that the mental health of almost 42% of respondents had declined since the outbreak began. Given all that’s happened between then and now, we can only imagine that the figure has increased. Much has been said about this short-term mental health impact, and the long-term effects are likely to be even more far-reaching.

Prior to the pandemic, many companies had increased their focus on workplace mental health (often in response to pressure from employees). Those efforts are even more imperative today.

As we navigate various transitions over the coming months and years, leaders are likely to see employees struggle with anxiety, depression, burnout, trauma, and PTSD. Those mental health experiences will differ according to race, economic opportunity, citizenship status, job type, parenting and caregiving responsibilities, and many other variables. So, what can managers and leaders do to support people as they face new stressors, safety concerns, and economic upheaval? Here’s our advice.

What Can Managers Do?

Even in the most uncertain of times, the role of a manager remains the same: to support your team members. That includes supporting their mental health. The good news is that many of the tools you need to do so are the same ones that make you an effective manager.

Be vulnerable. One silver lining of the pandemic is that it is normalizing mental health challenges. Almost everyone has experienced some level of discomfort. But the universality of the experience will translate into a decrease in stigma only if people, especially people in power, share their experiences. Being honest about your mental health struggles as a leader opens the door for employees to feel comfortable talking with you about mental health challenges of their own.

Prior to the pandemic, the biotech firm Roche Genentech produced videos in which senior leaders talked about their mental health. They were shared on the company intranet as part of a campaign called #Let’sTalk. The company then empowered “mental health champions” — a network of employees trained to help build awareness for mental health — to make videos about their experiences, which were used as part of the company’s various mental health awareness campaigns. (See the editor’s note below regarding our relationships with this company and others mentioned in this article.)

Those of us working from home have had no choice but to be transparent about our lives, whether our kids have crashed our video meetings or our coworkers have gotten glimpses of our homes. When managers describe their challenges, whether mental-health-related or not, it makes them appear human, relatable, and brave. Research has shown that authentic leadership can cultivate trust and improve employee engagement and performance.

Model healthy behaviors. Don’t just say you support mental health. Model it so that your team members feel they can prioritize self-care and set boundaries. More often than not, managers are so focused on their team’s well-being and on getting the work done that they forget to take care of themselves. Share that you’re taking a walk in the middle of the day, having a therapy appointment, or prioritizing a staycation (and actually turning off email) so that you don’t burn out.

Build a culture of connection through check-ins. Intentionally checking in with each of your direct reports on a regular basis is more critical than ever. That was important but often underutilized in pre-pandemic days. Now, with so many people working from home, it can be even harder to notice the signs that someone is struggling. In our study with Qualtrics and SAP, nearly 40% of global employees said that no one at their company had asked them if they were doing OK — and those respondents were 38% more likely than others to say that their mental health had declined since the outbreak.

Go beyond a simple “How are you?” and ask specific questions about what supports would be helpful. Wait for the full answer. Really listen, and encourage questions and concerns. Of course, be careful not to be overbearing; that could signal a lack of trust or a desire to micromanage.

When someone shares that they’re struggling, you won’t always know what to say or do. What’s most important is to make space to hear how your team members are truly doing and to be compassionate. They may not want to share much detail, which is completely fine. Knowing that they can is what matters.

Offer flexibility and be inclusive. Expect that the situation, your team’s needs, and your own needs will continue to change. Check in regularly — particularly at transition points. You can help problem-solve any issues that come up only if you know what’s happening. Those conversations will also give you an opportunity to reiterate norms and practices that support mental health. Inclusive flexibility is about proactive communication and norm-setting that helps people design and preserve the boundaries they need.

Don’t make assumptions about what your direct reports need; they will most likely need different things at different times. Take a customized approach to addressing stressors, such as challenges with childcare or feeling the need to work all the time. Proactively offer flexibility. Be as generous and realistic as possible. Basecamp CEO Jason Fried recently announced that employees with any type of caretaking responsibilities could set their own schedules, even if that meant working fewer hours. Being accommodating doesn’t necessarily mean lowering your standards. Flexibility can help your team thrive amid the continued uncertainty.

Normalize and model this new flexibility by highlighting how you’ve changed your own behavior. Stacey Sprenkel, a partner at the law firm Morrison & Foerster, proactively told her teams that she was working odd hours because of her childcare responsibilities and invited them to share what they needed to work best during the pandemic.

Ask team members to be patient and understanding with one another as they adapt. Trust them and assume the best. They are relying on you and will remember how you treated them during this unprecedented time.

Communicate more than you think you need to. Our study with Qualtrics and SAP showed that employees who felt their managers were not good at communicating have been 23% more likely than others to experience mental health declines since the outbreak. Make sure you keep your team informed about any organizational changes or updates. Clarify any modified work hours and norms. Remove stress where possible by setting expectations about workloads, prioritizing what must get done, and acknowledging what can slide if necessary.

Make your team aware of available mental health resources and encourage them to use them. Almost 46% of all workers in our study said that their company had not proactively shared those. If you’ve shared them once, share them again. And be aware that shame and stigma prevent many employees from using their mental health benefits to seek treatment, so normalize the use of those services.

Although managers will be on the front lines of addressing mental health issues, it’s on the most-senior leaders in your company to take action as well.

What Else Can Organizational Leaders Do?

In our 2019 Mental Health at Work Report, issued in partnership with SAP and Qualtrics, the most commonly desired workplace mental health resources were a more open and accepting culture, clearer information about where to go or whom to ask for support, and training.

Mental health symptoms are just as common in the C-Suite as among individual contributors. Sharing your own mental health challenges and modeling healthy behavior are two of the most important steps you can take. Here are a few additional things that leaders can do to normalize and support mental health at work.

Invest in training. Now more than ever, you should prioritize proactive and preventive workplace mental health training for leaders, managers, and individual contributors. Before the pandemic, companies including Morrison & Foerster and Verizon Media were convening senior leaders to discuss their role in creating a mentally healthy culture. That positioned them well to navigate the uncertainty that has unfolded. As more and more employees struggle with mental health, it’s important to debunk common myths, reduce stigma, and build the necessary skills to have productive conversations about mental health at work. If you don’t have the budget to invest in training, mental health employee resource groups are a low-cost way to increase awareness, build community, and offer peer support.

Modify policies and practices. To reduce stress on everyone, be as generous and flexible as possible in updating policies and practices in reaction to the pandemic and civil unrest. For example, you may need to take a closer look at your rules and norms around flexible hours, paid time off, email and other communications, and paid and unpaid leave. Try to reframe performance reviews as opportunities for compassionate feedback and learning instead of evaluations against strict targets. In mid-March, the CEO of Wikimedia Foundation sent an email to her organization outlining changes to mitigate stress, including: “If you need to dial back [work hours], that’s okay.” She also committed to paying contractors and hourly staff on the basis of their typical hours, regardless of their ability to work. When you make changes, be explicit that you are doing so to support the mental health of your employees, if that is the goal.

Measure. Ensuring accountability doesn’t have to be complicated; it can be handled in a simple pulse survey done regularly to understand how people are doing now and over time. BlackRock, the global investment management firm, is one of many organizations that have conducted pulse surveys during the pandemic to understand the primary stressors and needs of staff. This direct employee input has helped shape new programs, including remote management skill-building for managers, enhanced health and well-being support for employees, and increased work flexibility and time off.

As much as we might like to return to the way things were, we won’t. So let’s use this opportunity to create the mentally healthy workplace cultures that should have existed all along.

Source: HBR 07 Aug, 2020

Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught in a Classroom?

 

In early April, a Thai student in our entrepreneurship class saw a shortage of high quality, low cost hand sanitizer across Thailand. To support the Covid relief effort and generate revenue, he quickly shifted his family’s medical supply company to sanitizer production. Closer to home, when Dollaride, a business incubated in NYU’s Future Labs, recognized that the pandemic had eliminated demand for their shared commuting van business in New York, they refreshed their business model to leverage their existing vans, technology, and routes to support burgeoning package delivery demands.

Neither entrepreneur followed a typical business school approach when deciding to pivot their business: they didn’t conduct a long-term market analysis, develop a business plan, or weigh various alternative approaches. In fact, had they done these analyses, they might have concluded that the short-term gains wouldn’t justify the retooling investment, or they might have gotten stuck trying to figure out how to estimate the duration of the pandemic or how soon global manufacturing might recover. Instead, they simply took action based on the resources at their disposal.

This approach to entrepreneurship is called “effectuation,” or leveraging what we know, who we know, and who we are in order to take action. Business schools don’t generally teach this approach, as they tend to focus more on lengthy risk and return calculations. But as we face an increasingly uncertain, complex future, schools must adopt new teaching philosophies designed to forge agile, entrepreneurial leaders.

Can Business Schools Teach Entrepreneurship?

While modern MBA programs offer a host of entrepreneurship programming ranging from formal coursework to startup competitions and incubators, there is a great degree of skepticism around the idea that entrepreneurship can be taught by academics in a classroom. Countless successful entrepreneurs never went to business school — many didn’t even graduate from college. Moreover, developing the penchant for imagination, disruption, and counterintuitive action required for effective entrepreneurship doesn’t generally fit into a typical business school curriculum defined by abstract analytical models and precise calculations.

Nevertheless, many schools feel that there is still a place for formal education in the world of entrepreneurship, and have taken steps to update their offerings to meet the needs of today’s students. In a recent study, we looked at three top North American MBA programs to better understand how they are approaching this challenge. In an industry where programs are prone to mimicking one another, we found that these programs broke the mold and developed their own philosophies in teaching entrepreneurship.

The first approach we observed focused on instilling an appreciation for the value of real-life experience with an “operating theater” classroom setup. The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management converted their entrepreneurship classroom into a medical-school-style operating theater, where students sit in a large auditorium and watch as a professor performs surgery not on a human body, but on a startup. In Rotman’s Creative Destruction Lab, a panel of established entrepreneurs join the professors in poking and prodding at these startups, helping students absorb the intuition that entrepreneurship skills can only be developed through experience. Other business schools have adopted similar programs, such as NYU Stern’s Endless Frontier Labs, which shares Rotman’s focus on experiential learning.

The second approach we observed focused on “rewiring” students to take action instead of falling into analysis paralysis. We all have a voice in our heads that says, “What if this goes wrong?” or “How do I manage this risk?” Imagine the power of an education that helps you quiet that voice and instead say, “What if it goes right?” The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business is the birthplace of “effectual” entrepreneurship, an approach that invites students to recognize their existing entrepreneurial resources and accept a certain amount of risk. This mindset is antithetical to a more conventional business school approach that emphasizes minimizing risk. Additionally, while the business world is often known for its cut-throat, fiercely competitive nature, Darden’s program instills in students an appreciation for the power of collaborative innovation by encouraging students to share ideas openly with their peers and tap into diverse insights and perspectives to co-create entrepreneurial ventures.

The final program we observed took more of a traditional business school approach. Our research suggests that the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School continues to emphasize the types of resource and risk optimization approaches that are more characteristic of the rest of the business school world. This approach is grounded in the idea that business schools should teach entrepreneurship in a similar way to how other subjects are taught: by providing students with analytical models and tools from published academic research on new venture creation. While this philosophy may be helpful for more mature startups, as well as for helping founders avoid common startup pitfalls — such as choosing the wrong co-founder, accepting poor venture finance terms, or making suboptimal product decisions — it’s less useful for entrepreneurs dealing with extreme uncertainty.

Educate MBA Students to Embrace an Unknowable Future

The current pandemic illustrates the importance of preparing entrepreneurs to face an increasingly complex, uncertain world. We must educate these future leaders to view the uncertainty of our unknowable future not as a problem to be solved, but rather as a reality to be embraced.

After all, in the unknowable future, all leaders will need to be entrepreneurs: visionaries that can imagine, adapt, and act nimbly to address whatever challenges come their way. Business schools should not delay in adopting new teaching philosophies that empower the next generation of entrepreneurs — as well as all business leaders — to meet these challenges.

Source: HBR 07 Aug, 2020

Put people first and your organization will be successful in future: Cargill India's HR Head

He mentioned that the company has seen outstanding resilience amongst the teams, with employees putting in longer hours and additional effort to get work done.

Raj Karunakaran, HR Head, Cargill India feels that during this crisis, the everyday performance management helped Cargill in responding to business challenges with far more agility. In an interaction with People Matters, he shares the key focus areas for the company, why the organization is measuring performance amid the crisis and how he is preparing the business and workforce post-COVID.  

As a leader, do you measure performances during the crisis? If yes, what are the key parameters that are considered while measuring performances?

Back in 2012, Cargill decided that effective performance management needs to be a continuous process. Instead of per­for­mance rat­ings and annu­al review forms, we focus on man­agers hav­ing fre­quent, on-the-job con­ver­sa­tions, and giv­ing reg­u­lar, con­struc­tive feed­back. We call it ‘Every­day Per­for­mance Man­age­ment’. This includes effec­tive two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion, giv­ing feed­back, and coaching. During this crisis, everyday performance management helped Cargill in responding to business challenges with far more agility.

We focused on –

Simplified process, goals aligned to the changing business needs, and a new way of working protocols.

Ongoing discussions between managers and employees, informal feedback, coaching, goal review, and adjustment during the crisis.

Simplified and flexible goal setting with fewer, more dynamic goals aligned to business strategy and tailored to the dynamic business environment.

Qualitative assessment of the employee achievements, contribution to business success, and development opportunities.

During the crisis, our managers approached performance management with more flexibility, leniency, empathy, and compassion. We looked at various ways to recognize and show appreciation for employees who ensured we continue to deliver to our commitments. This approach has helped Cargill in keeping high employee morale, engagement, and productivity during this crisis.

How do you recommend addressing performance management today? What are some of the pillars of performance that you focus on?

The need for performance management systems is to be flexible and agile in order to meet a myriad of business needs and dealing with challenges during the COVID crisis. Employee-manager relationships and trust are central and the foundation of the performance management. The pillars of a strong performance management process are having more frequent, future-focused conversations on continuous improvement and development. It’s critical that managers and employees feel equipped and empowered to adapt both their work and goals to the new situation. By putting people first, you will help set up your organization to be successful in the future.

As the pandemic resets work trends, how should HR leaders rethink workforce and performance planning? What approach are you following?

In many organizations, HR remains the custodian of overseeing the performance management process. It is critical that HR leaders rethink this approach and see how it can be made truly a manager-employees driven process. We believe that effective performance management is an ongoing process employee-manager relationships are at the heart of effective performance management. 

Performance management processes need to be flexible to address different business needs. We have invested in strengthening the related capabilities of both managers and employees. This included building trust, coaching, effective communication and effectively delivering and receiving feedback. Here are some of our approach at Cargill.

Engage in more dynamic and flexible goal-setting rather than once a year SMART goals.

Build managers' capability on coaching, giving regular informal feedback rather than limiting feedback to once or twice in a year.

Streamline documentation to the minimum required rather than extensive and complex documentation.

We have integrated a coaching approach in our performance management process. This approach has built an engaging and collaborative partnership between our employees and managers. Managers guide employees to make deliberate and empowered choices. It helps in generating creativity and promotes collaborative discovery of solutions and helps employees understand how they can develop and grow.

One of the studies suggests that globally 43% of people are redesigning jobs as a way to prepare for the future of work. As people leaders continue to wrap their heads in this crisis. How can employers ensure their workers to embrace new technology and upskill themselves?

We put people first and reach higher. These values guide every decision we make. It helps us to balance both our business and people's needs. The pandemic has reshaped the way we think about our physical work environment for our employees – in our offices and plants, as well as how we connect with our customers.  As a result, we’ve turned our attention to how we innovate our ‘new normal’ embracing new technologies and upskilling our employees to work in a new work protocol.

This includes investments around virtual leadership, collaboration tools, digital ways of doing business, long-term goals for employee experiences, as well as the physical needs of the organization like work innovations, technology investments, etc. COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of fully digitized approaches to re-create the best of in-person learning through live video and social sharing. This transformation permits greater personalization for learners—and in turn greater effectiveness.

You have launched the Cargill Cares Employee Disaster Relief Fund for the health and wellbeing of the employees. What was the thought behind coming up with such an announcement? Do you think, it’s high time and employers need to prioritize the well-being of the employees? Do corporates need ‘Chief Wellness Officer’?

At the core of our values is our commitment to Putting People First. Our commitment is stronger than ever as we navigate this challenging time. Mitigating financial distress for those impacted by COVID-19 is a key pillar of our Putting People First commitment. To support employees during times of personal or natural disaster, including the COVID-19 crisis, Cargill recently launched the Cargill Cares Employee Disaster Relief Fund and contributed $15 million as an initial start to the fund. Employees can apply or contribute to the employee disaster relief fund through a new online portal. The fund will be managed by a non-profit organization, E4E Relief, which specializes in administering funds like ours. We hope through this fund, we can come together in a powerful way to help our colleagues by providing some peace of mind during this incredibly uncertain time.

We’ve taken all necessary precautions to support employees and keep people safe at our production facilities, including temperature testing, cleaning and sanitizing procedures, prohibiting visitors from entering our facilities, prohibiting international travel, limiting domestic travel, adopting social distancing practices and offering shift flexibility to keep our major production facilities open. We’re prioritizing overall health and wellness, which includes mental health support for employees. We have a dedicated focus on providing resources, including a Psychological Well-Being Toolkit. In the next six months, we will deliver additional employee and leader resources, mental health awareness training, and leadership-led campaign to de-stigmatize mental health and demonstrate care and concern.

What kind of impact you have seen on the business and workforce due to this pandemic and how are you preparing your business and workforce post-COVID?

During this unprecedented time, Cargill is working around the clock with farmers and our customers to continue feeding the world safely, responsibly and sustainably. As our work comes under the ‘essential services category’, the responsibilities of our employees have risen exponentially during this time. We have seen outstanding resilience amongst our teams, with employees putting in longer hours and additional effort to get work done.

 I strongly feel that this is a time to show more empathy, be role-models and be declarative on employee wellbeing and worklife balance. Goes without saying, that we are providing all possible infrastructure support to help employees work remotely and ensuring all safety precautions are taken at our manufacturing locations across India.

Source: People Matters 07 Aug, 2020

 

Telemedicine is Laying the Roadmap for Healthcare's Future

One New York doctor explains how it has "introduced a whole new level of convenience and respite."Growing up, I had witnessed my father, Dr. Franco Lenna, MD, attend to patients in his clinic. However, the past several months have changed the way healthcare works and proven that telemedicine holds a lot of promise. It has, in fact, become a necessity, since it reduces vulnerability while allowing doctors and nurses to handle more patients. At the same time, it provides increased efficiency and accessibility to those in need. It not only eliminates travel, but also provides clinical support seamlessly, improves patient outcomes and overcomes geographic hurdles.  So, whether we are prepared or not, telemedicine is on its journey into the fold, slowly increasing in acceptance and set to transform the future of healthcare as we know it. Per McKinsey & Company, providers across the U.S. "are seeing 50 to 175 times the number of patients via telehealth than they did before."To explore this topic in-depth, I spoke with Dr. Ari Bernstein, MD, a New York-based physician and author who is operating at the leading edge of telemedicine. "We must realize that telemedicine is at its pinnacle in present times, expanding and growing far beyond usual interactions between patients and physicians," he explains. "For me, technology is multiplying the relevance and value of telehealth by meeting the aim to improve people's health, reduce costs, enhance the patient experience and increase provider satisfaction while ensuring everyone's safety."Greater monitoring, larger accessDr. Bernstein shares that "the use of telemedicine to screen a patient's health remotely has introduced a whole new level of convenience and respite for both health providers and patients. It is serving to substitute in-person visits to a medical professional by facilitating virtual doctor meetings."Greater monitoring, larger accessIt has also made additional monitoring and care possible that was otherwise unavailable. For instance, patients living in far-flung areas can virtually consult with experts who can monitor and evaluate their condition and make sure they receive the right treatment at the right time. Though Dr. Bernstein cautions that "this hasn't entirely eliminated visits to the doctor, but instead, the process of physical appointments and telehealth are functioning in tandem with each other."With telemedicine, physicians are able to provide consultation, healthcare information and services to patients or clients at multiple locations. Defeating geographic barriers is particularly crucial in remote zones where people may have to travel hundreds of miles to see a special care provider, even when they are ill."Telemedicine is proving to be convenient for constantly monitoring chronic ailments like diabetes, hypertension or COVID-19," says Dr. Bernstein.Relative affordabilityTelemedicine is already playing a huge role in containing costs. In the past, providers struggled with compensation for telehealth services, but more and more health insurers are reimbursing the fees for these consultations. Consequently, patients are starting to view it as a viable system. Improved patient satisfaction"With the move towards consumerization and value-based care, it has now, more than ever, become vital to cater to the patients' needs," Dr. Bernstein implores. "Telemedicine, through its offerings ranging from lower cost, efficient monitoring and reduced wait times, is appealing to patients."And even though I grew up watching my father run a more traditional in-person practice, I strongly second Dr. Bernstein's outlook. Telemedicine is a win-win for all and should continue gaining ground and revolutionizing all facets of the health space.Source: Entrepreneur India 03 Aug, 2020