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By Prenessa Nalliah, Founder and Director of Perana Viosa

Mental health is a more widely discussed subject today than ever before. There are entire retreats, seminars, roadshows, and conferences dedicated to the subject, and yet staff turnover remains a challenge for many organisations.

I’m always telling my trainees that even double-headed coins can have two different sides, so here’s my view on how this relates to workplace wellness.

The employer’s side

We all have a pretty good idea of what we expect from an employer that claims to support employees with their mental health. Some examples:

• Flexible working hours
• Remote and hybrid opportunities where possible
• Appropriate paid time off
• Simpler HR processes
• Consideration of our family responsibilities
• A healthy rate of pay for our contributions
• Retirement and medical benefits
• Educational advancement subsidies
• Social activities among staff
• Trust (this is perhaps what underpins everything)

What often gets added into the mix are the things that employees frown upon if the above, which can be considered the basics, aren’t in place.

Take, for example, PR campaigns about wellness. These tend to promote intensely positive narratives that don’t always translate into the employee experience and can even create more stress if employees are pulled away from their daily workload to participate in such campaigns, and then they’re expected to find personal time to meet deadlines.

You don’t need to break the bank to look after your employees.

Having had the privilege of being both an employee and employer simultaneously for six of the past 11 years, I’ve found that employers can make a difference by supporting employees in the simplest of ways on a daily basis:

• Respect time offline
• After 10h30 don’t expect a full day of work to come in before someone signs off if it hasn’t already been briefed

• Obtain bottom-up feedback regularly
• Allow subordinates to evaluate managers from time to time
• Structure social time so it doesn’t threaten operational time
• Set healthy timelines for every brief and be willing to move out other projects for emergent priorities

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The employee’s side

With all that we can expect and appeal for from our employers, we must also recognise the responsibility to apply the same standards to ourselves. It’s too easy to blame an employer for a toxic work environment. It takes real courage to first try to improve it. 

There are some companies that genuinely invest budgets into employee wellness, including the provision of mental health practitioner sessions, gyms on site, and yoga studio partnerships, among all the other efforts already mentioned in this article. Sometimes employees still need to be held accountable for their choices to use or not use the avenues provided.

We speak about companies as if there’s not a single great one that really exists, but they are there. They’re just investing more in their people directly instead of investing in PR and award campaigns.

What can employees do to improve workplace wellness?

The very first thing is to share in the responsibility of making this world a better place for

everyone in it. If that resonates deeply enough, everything else becomes a little easier:

• Listen to colleagues’ social stories over lunch and commutes.
• Treat each other with respect.
• Provide feedback respectfully.
• Communicate: rather let someone have feedback than bury it.
• Be truthful about when you feel overwhelmed.
• Actually take time to read your company’s policies: you might find something useful
• Separate your self-worth from your work (negative feedback is not an attack on your character).

Simon Sinek is famously known for discussing the challenges of the generation that is entering the workplace now and how they’re finding it difficult to cope with rejection and workplace friction, some of which is only natural and can even be healthy and useful in business.

By using these guidelines, employees from all walks of life will be able to consciously improve the quality of their working environment, both for themselves and for their colleagues.

Whose responsibility is it anyway?

For those who are currently job-seeking, my advice is to highlight how you can add greater value to the team dynamic beyond the contribution of your technical skills. Employers can adjust the recruitment and evaluation processes for greater consideration of human factors beyond experience and qualifications.

When the load is shared, it’s easier for both sides to carry it effectively. The sooner we stop thinking, “It’s not my job,” the better for everyone involved.

This second edition of Top HR Leaders continues the Topco tradition of powerful publications celebrating success and spreading inspiration. Read it here: 

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