In recent years, more focus has been placed on companies taking the mental wellbeing of their employees seriously. This topic was growing steadily before the pandemic and then seemed to spike a little shortly afterwards, remaining at a high level since then.
Whilst the pandemic itself led to far more remote working and as a result, more flexible working schedules, it also led to a difficulty for many in drawing a boundary between work life and home life.
Before the pandemic, when many of us commuted into an office, it was a lot easier to draw boundaries and we had different spaces for these different parts of our life. Now, it may be a case of folding a laptop away after working in the kitchen, or walking from a spare bedroom to the kitchen when the work day ends.
Mentally, this means that there isn’t the “wind down” time where our minds start to disengage from work and shift to home life.
Why do I mention all of this?
As a manager, you need to be aware of this context in which your team (and you!) is operating. Particularly given that many of us will manage teams who are either fully or partly remote.
The question becomes, how do you ensure that wherever your team works, that you can look after their mental wellbeing and as a result, ensure that you enable high performance from them?
Let’s take a look at a few tactical ways that you can do this.
But first a quick, but important sidenote.
Who has responsibility for employee wellbeing?
I’ve been an employee at a couple of agencies in my career. I’ve also run my own agency. So I’ve been on both sides of the fence here in terms of responsibilities.
My honest take is that responsibility is split and both sides have to take ownership of wellbeing in different ways.
I absolutely do not agree with those who say that the onus is completely on a company. Having been in the position of running a company and doing more than most for team wellbeing, yet still seeing people struggle sometimes, I can say this with experience.
In my view, there is an equal onus on an individual to take ownership of their own mental wellbeing as well because ultimately, they are usually in the best position to communicate what works (and doesn’t work) for them as an individual.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that a company should do nothing and shift the onus completely onto their team. This doesn’t work either.
For you as a manager, this means that yes, you should be aware of the wellbeing of your team and take responsibility for it.
But… it isn’t 100% on you and that’s not a fair bar for you to set for yourself, so don’t put that all on your own shoulders.
Ironically, this is because you need to look after your own wellbeing too!
Okay, with that in mind, let’s look at a few concrete ways that you can look after the mental wellbeing of your team.
Encourage a shutdown routine
I’m a huge fan of enabling your mind to transition from work time to personal time. As mentioned, this used to be triggered for most people by their commute between the office and home. Perhaps they’d read a book or listen to a podcast. Or like me, stare aimlessly out of the train window for half an hour!
Whatever it is, you need to encourage your team to “be done” when work is over.
I’ve written about shutdown routines before, so you can check out more details there. I’ve also shared my own shutdown routine which you can watch me perform and talk about in this video.
You should lead the way here and ensure that you have an effective shutdown routine. Then work with your team to enable them to do the same – everyone is different and their routine could be different to yours. But the key point is that they need to be able to physically and mentally relax and unwind once work is done for the day.
If they don’t, then they’ll get to the point where mentally, they are becoming more and more drained with work, ultimately meaning that they aren’t being very effective and their mental wellbeing needs some more serious help.
Be aware of the difference between stressed and busy
It’s really important to recognise that there is a difference between someone being busy and someone being stressed and this leading to their mental wellbeing suffering.
It’s difficult because the line can be very fine between the two and we can stray either side of it without realising.
For me, you need to recognise when things are going beyond busy and looking for signs such as:
- Things aren’t just busy, they feel out of control.
- The feeling of being busy is relentless and may be getting worse.
- Boundaries are hard to draw because things are so busy.
- Someone’s personal life starts to be affected by how busy they are.
- It doesn’t feel like there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Essentially, being busy is fine but there should always be a feeling that things are under control and being busy is giving someone energy and enthusiasm about their role, rather than having the opposite effect.
Provide clarity on what drives top performance
One cause of mental health problems at work can be overworking in terms of hours. Quite simply, someone works too many hours, has little time for downtime and this leads to their mental health taking a big hit.
A cause of this can be the misconception that top performance = working more hours.
In reality, we all only have a limited number of hours per day when we’re effective anyway. So even if we work extra hours, we aren’t necessarily performing well during those extra hours, especially if we do it on a regular basis.
As a manager, you need to steer your team away from this type of thinking and instead, focus them on what top performance actually means to you and your company.
Of course, there may be times when your team works extra hours and I wouldn’t necessarily discourage this completely. But it shouldn’t become the measure of performance or the norm for this to happen.
Understand what occupies time vs. headspace
Leading on from this, someone can become stressed and anxious at work despite not appearing to work a higher than usual number of hours.
This happens because sometimes, it’s our headspace that is dominated by lots and lots of things, rather than our physical time that is dominated by lots and lots of things.
Those of you who work in agencies should be particularly aware of this because this environment lends itself a lot to this problem. This is because someone may work on say, five clients and technically have enough hours in a day / week / month to deliver the work, but if several clients email or call on the same day with problems, this can make them feel overwhelmed.
So it’s not the hours that they need to work that causes the problems, it’s the amount of headspace that’s taken up in order to deal with those problems.
Take the principles of self-organisation and control seriously
It’s important that you encourage your team to embrace principles that enable them to keep themselves organised and in control of their day-to-day work.
For example, at a bare minimum, your team (and you) should understand and implement things such as:
These are relatively simple skills to learn, but can have a huge impact on someone’s day-to-day organisation and ultimately, their ability to keep control of their responsibilities.
Set the right example
Finally, you need to manage your own wellbeing effectively before you’ll be able to do the same for others.
The saying “put your own mask on before helping others” applies here, meaning that as a leader, you need to ensure that you’re looking after yourself first and foremost.
Not only that, but your team will be looking up to you and how you handle things when times get difficult. They’ll see how your mental wellbeing is and how this affects the team and the work that you do.
You should be the one that demonstrates the importance of mental wellbeing and sharing the things that work for you, then helping your team discover what works well for them.
