While you’re still clamoring to get your 2023 plans together, don’t forget to include your employees’ mental health on the list of this year’s initiatives.
Mental health days can help bring back focus for your employees upon their return. Having days like these can also lead to better health outcomes, as employees, working at a constant high pace, can lose sight of self-care, including healthy eating and getting enough rest.
It’s easy to tick a box and create a stronger and healthier team in ’23.
What are the benefits of offering mental health days?
- Productivity is likely to increase by offering mental health days. Offering a reset to your employees allows them to cope with their stress more effectively.
- Offering mental health days can help prevent burnout in your organization.
- Employees are likely to see improved health outcomes as they focus on themselves and healthy practices.
- Offering these days can reduce the stress of taking needed time off.
What is the best way to get started offering mental health days?
The first step is the decision to pursue the avenue. The next is to make sure any potential policy implemented is effective throughout the organization, which can be done by adhering to a few basic practices.
Communications: Make sure your employees know you support their needs at work and beyond the office doors by letting them know. This can be done through email or by mentioning the new policy at company meetings or through other internal comms. If a company has a policy that no one uses, it won’t be effective.
Talk directly to your employees: Communication is a very important piece, but companies should also work to find out what employees think of any new policy. Doing an anonymous survey, or even a one-on-one interview, can help gain a better picture of what’s happening on the ground. Big failures that involved not paying attention to what was going on on the street included the 2008 financial crisis where home loans were being given out to anyone and everyone with a brewing issue of affordability and taking on too much debt was building.
Consistency: Consistency (or authenticity) is the way companies operate their policies. If a company builds its brand on being a leader in mental health but decides to later punish employees for taking all their available mental health days, this can hurt the brand image and create situations of distrust within the organization. Companies that do this might find they later have issues with retention and other, similar issues.
Following these tenets can help bring success, not distrust and deterioration, to an organization. Take, and handle with, care.