May is mental health awareness month and there has never been a more relevant time to talk about supporting employees' mental health and wellbeing. What strategies have your organization implemented to support employee mental health and wellbeing during this time of crisis?
Strategies for supporting employee mental health during times of crisis?
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Aside from promoting our EFAP, we've been really focussed on supporting connections and balance.
Connections includes starting each conversation or meeting with meaningful discussions around how people are managing, and sharing vulnerably with each other. We've been leveraging video calls as much as possible, and building in those "coffee chats" that don't happen naturally during isolation.
Balance has been a really creative space. There are plenty of team challenges to encourage each of us to get outside, move our bodies, do something the feeds our souls, do something small to lift up our communities, take a break from our computers, and reflect on what's most important for us to "bring back" in the post-covid world. A lot of our teams have also implemented events such as mindfulness mondays (facilitated workshops or youtube tutorials), meeting free Fridays, and fun pyjama or crazy hat days.
One of our continuing challenges is encouraging people to use their vacation/personal time to balance the added responsibilities of child care and complicated grocery shopping, or just to balance the stress of this time. With "nowhere to go", many are trying to tough it out until this passes, and we are concerned with the risk of burnout.
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CHine great examples - love the point about "vulnerability"! And I have heard the same concern (even internally) about people not using their personal and vacation time. That's a very real concern!
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