Women taking break during work from home
One morning in the winter of 2013, I woke up shaking uncontrollably. I had no other physical symptoms and no amount of slow breathing, distraction, or other intervention would help. Eventually, my body calmed down. This happened again a week later, and then began happening regularly, sometimes lasting for hours.
My diagnosis? Stress.
I was starting an organization, enrolled in a full-time graduate program, and involved in several side projects. I was intensely productive while being “healthy” across all dimensions—exercising regularly, eating healthy, finding social and spiritual connection. But all of that was insufficient to the demands I was facing at work and school.
My experience of severe stress has become the new normal for many employees. With uncertainty in the economy, geopolitical climate, and pandemic-aftermath, it’s no wonder almost half of American workers feel burnt out.
In our work at Mind Share Partners, we see companies are noticing the stresses employees are facing—90% of employers are increasing investment in mental health programs, 76% in stress management and resilience programs, and 71% in mindfulness and mediation programs. However, responding by doubling down on individual wellness supports—as I did—will not be effective without addressing the source of the stress that’s being created by work.
Resilience Training Is Meaningless Without Looking In The Mirror
Tools that help individuals manage their own mental health are just one component of a company culture that supports mental health. Mind Share Partners’ 2021 Mental Health at Work report found that the most desired resource by U.S. employees for mental health is not a benefit at all, but an open culture about mental health at work. Telling your people, “Here’s an app to help you with stress at work,” might be helpful, but it isn’t sufficient. If your employees work in an environment with long hours, providing a tool that takes extra time to use may seem laughable.
Employers must stop seeing chronic stress as solely an individual's responsibility, and approach stress and mental health at work as a collective priority. That requires changing the way that we work. Companies need to prioritize taking the time to understand, identify, and mitigate the stressors impacting their workforce, while also providing training and resources to help employees, managers, and leaders build skills for managing the inevitable stressors we cannot control. Below are three key approaches for employers.
Business colleagues are planning strategy at desk.
Embed Mental Health Considerations Into Your Work Practices
Mitigating chronic stress requires a belief and commitment from leadership and the entire organization that we’re all in this together. In stressful economic times, companies tend to pull back on investments in training, support, DEIB, and culture change that focuses on employee wellbeing—we’re seeing signs of this now. As fear of a recession grows and companies are compelled to cut costs, it can feel easy to cut “soft skills” development programs. This is a mistake. Considerations and practices that support mental health need to be baked into the way you run your business. Companies who take employee mental health seriously emerge more strongly from economic downturns.
Mental health support and training should be woven into company culture, not a one-off training that is brought in when a crisis happens. During the pandemic many organizations increased their investment in mental health, but that enthusiasm has faded into the background as belts tighten and we’re physically coming back to work.
But here’s the thing: stress builds over time, and stressors pile on top of each other. Reducing stress doesn't happen overnight either. Companies must invest time and resources to examine how various aspects of company culture and practice create stress. This could include everything from shifting the values of the organization, to redefining benefits, to rethinking performance management and advancement. The Surgeon General’s new framework on workplace mental health and wellbeing is an excellent place to start.
Help Teams Manage Negative Workplace Stressors Where Possible
Many of the levers that increase or reduce stress occur at the team level. In times of chronic stress and uncertainty, clear, frequent communication in teams becomes crucial. Managers and their teams should have conversations about what expectations are, how work is done within the group, and how issues get managed.
My colleague Bill Greene, principal at Mind Share Partners, notes, “The challenge in our world right now is that it seems very difficult to turn the stress off. But there are ways to mitigate the impact—at least in the workplace.” He recommends leaders and managers set clear norms and establish adaptations that can help employees manage high stress when it hits.
He suggests evaluating the answers to questions like:
- What are core operating hours for teams?
- When an assignment comes in, is there a conversation about deadlines, about capacity, about working hours?
- Are there reminders about values and purpose that give context and meaning to the work that everyone understands and supports?
It doesn’t matter if employees are lawyers, in financial services, hospital staff, or hourly shift workers, conversations about norms and adaptations that focus on the people, not just the production, have a meaningful impact on mental health.
“You want to reduce anxiety through clarity,” says author and workplace anxiety expert Morra Aarons-Mele. “In times of stress people get anxious when they operate on assumptions, presumptions, and past expectations.” Unpack the way work gets done and develop clear ground rules about how work gets done, along with ideas for adaptations that you can make if an employee needs a respite.
One to one communications matter too. Managers who take the time to really check in with their team, and do so frequently, can surface challenges and issues earlier, and work together with staff to solve them more effectively.
Build Fluency Around What Stress Is And How it Shows Up At Work
When people know their stressors, they can take steps to mitigate the negative effects. It’s important to remember that we need a certain amount of stress. Stress and anxiety drive performance and a certain amount of stress is productive.
Think about the anxiety you feel when you’re up against a deadline, or about to give a presentation in front of a group. In her book Good Anxiety, Dr. Wendy Suzuki, professor of neural science and psychology at New York University, pushes back against the conventional wisdom that stress and anxiety are always bad, all the time. Her work in neuroplasticity—the ability of the brain to adapt in response to the environment—became the cornerstone in her research on how we can take control of our anxiety and make it a useful tool rather than a negative, unproductive feeling that controls us.
The key is to find the “knife’s edge” between this desirable state where we’re alert and poised to act, and the kind of negative anxiety or stress reaction that compromises our functioning. “Good anxiety,” as Dr. Suzuki defines it, is the body-brain space where we’re engaged, alert, and feel just stressed enough to maximize our attention and focus on what we want to do.
“These moments of stress feel very different from the chronic stress many of us experience now,” Bill Greene notes. People suffer when the stress and anxiety never turn off, and chronic stress brings damaging mental and physical symptoms. Luckily, there are proactive ways organizations can reduce the impact of negative stressors in their workplace, both in the moment and over time. Leaders can’t control what happens in the world or the economy, but they can develop sustainable ways of working, understand the factors that are negatively impacting mental health in their workplace, and equip employees with the resources, knowledge, and skills to proactively manage what they can.
In uncertain times, investing in mental health at work makes all the difference.
