How are you feeling? How Mental Health is damaging our business.

Mental health is not something we have time for as a small entrepreneurial business – and we can’t afford to provide all those lovely mental health things like mindfulness training and gyms and employee assistance programmes.

 It’s easy to fall into this kind of thinking – and to be honest this is where a great deal of large corporates were not so long ago. And then came the Thriving at Work report¹ commissioned by the Government and suddenly we have a very rude awakening. It is not the people who are off sick that are the biggest drain on your business, it is the ones who are at work – but who are ill. Yes, we all go to work with a bit of a cough or cold (much to the annoyance of those people who are trying to avoid such germs) but, let’s face it, we surely can’t take time off for every little thing. Yet that is not the worrying problem. The really worrying problem is the number of us who are at work with a mental health issue – who are struggling or ill.

 According to the UK Government commissioned Stevenson/Farmer Thriving at Work Report October 2017¹, poor mental health costs employers between £33bn and £42bn per year. This equates to a cost per employee of between £1,205 and £1,560 per year. Even for a small organisation, this is significant.

 How does presenteeism affect your business?

 You’ll know if someone is present but not functioning – as this immediately impacts upon three key brain processes:

• The ability to problem solve
• The ability to think creativity
• The ability to work cooperatively

 It may not be immediately clear that your trusted and enthusiastic team member is actually working when ill. They may appear to be performing at an acceptable level – but perhaps this is where you notice they are not exactly ‘on fire’ with passion and joy. And this really does matter. For a start it is downwards trajectory – when people begin to get into a negative frame from a mental health perspective it doesn’t usually just suddenly switch ‘over time’. Due to the ‘future focussed’ time perspective we have developed (as coined by psychologist Philip Zimbardo²) we have a strong tendency to push our personal happiness ‘over the cognitive horizon’. In other words, jam tomorrow but never jam today!

 This driven mentality we have developed is based on the myth that all this hard work will eventually make us even more successful. Well, this is just not so, and the science does NOT support this idea.

 Presenteeism may be a problem for my team, but what about me?

 What message are you giving to your team by being at work at 7am and finishing at 7pm? Are you feeling energised and enthused by your work, or are you losing the joy of it? Are you planning retirement – or dreaming about it…

 It has been proven that by combining high levels of wellbeing and engagement we achieve our peak performance levels – but so many of us are struggling or surviving at work, and not thriving.

 Here are some tips to increase your performance and address presenteeism

1. Stop – and go home! I know it’s obvious, but when you get to that point when the work is feeling a little more difficult you will achieve a fraction of what you could if you were sharp and on form.
2. Take time to talk to people you love – this increases your levels of wellbeing and turns stress into a positive rather than a pressure on your immune system
3. In your daily to do list write down everything you achieve each day – so you don’t just see what you should have done, but you also see what you actually did – even if they weren’t on your to do list (and celebrate these things!)
4. Make sure you are getting 7- 8 hours sleep every night. If you need an alarm clock to wake you, then you are not getting enough.

 And for your team:

1.       Make it ok to talk about how you feel without it being ‘soft and fluffy’ – our feelings are our body chemistry changes, let’s stop treating them like something that we stop having when we are at work, and remember that they are important for all decision making and survival

2.       Monitor wellbeing levels and provide support for people when they are becoming ‘reactive’, as this signals a downward trajectory in mental health

3.       Remember, that by putting a simple mental health solution in place you can get a return on investment of 9 times³ - so really, it is a no-brainer.

 References

1 Stevenson/Farmer, Thriving at Work Report October 2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/658145/thriving-at-work-stevenson-farmer-review.pdf

2 Zimbardo, The Time Paradox: http://www.thetimeparadox.com/

3 MacLeod/Clarke, Engaging for Success: Enhancing Performance Through Employee Engagement: http://engageforsuccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/file52215.pdf “

Maria Paviour is an Occupational Psychologist and founder of the Maria Paviour Company Ltd, based at the Innovation Centre at the University of Sussex

What do we do?

An occupational psychology consultancy, we specialise in coaching and leadership development, through emotional engagement and wellbeing at work. Using evidence based research from the last ten years, we’ve built our flagship tool – CARI™ the Commitment and Resilience Index  - giving clients the ability to drill right down into the key aspects of wellbeing and emotional engagement at work. CARI™ provides revealing insights into the barriers that stop your employees from engaging in the workplace.

Who are we?

For over 25 years Maria has studied human psychology, biology and neuroscience, focusing on the importance of engaging employees and gaining employee commitment. In 2000, she won two awards to develop technology for measuring and managing stress at work. She’s published three books on neuroscience and leadership, and grown a team of coaching professionals, schooled in her own ‘NeuChem’ methodology.

Thanks to Stuart Paviour for writing this blog

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk