Editor's Note: This story is part of our Playbook for 2022 series that looks explores key questions, challenges and opportunities facing businesses in 2022. Find more stories in the series here.
For many employees, the pandemic spawned a sharper focus on mental health. How employers respond represents a potential differentiator for recruitment, retention and employee well-being in 2022, experts say.
Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, a licensed psychologist with over 30 years of experience and a faculty member at The Park School in Brookline, Massachusetts, and the Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology in Boston, said the pandemic exposed mental-health stigmas and heightened the need for employers to be proactive on the issue.
“Employers and employees have all of a sudden realized they have more in common than they thought,” she said. “Employers have found themselves faced with a workforce that is struggling.”
In the past, if people were struggling physically or mentally, Moorehead-Slaughter said employers were able to finesse it and not really deal with it head on because they felt things would improve over time. The pandemic changed that.
“We had a structure around us and a world around us that was pretty much holding things steady, but that has been totally upended,” she said.
Moorehead-Slaughter said employers have found themselves with a workforce that is saying, “Wait a minute, maybe my work is not my whole life.”
Employees have been called on to be full-time educators, full-time parents or full-time caregivers for elderly parents in an unprecedented way.
Those factors are leading many employees to do a recalculation and reset their thinking about their work lives, she said. It’s forcing employers to think differently about how they approach mental health.
As they head into a new year, Moorehead-Slaughter said employers would be wise to be vocal about giving workers permission to focus on their mental health.
“Silence is damning, and it is deadly,” she said. “I think it is a matter of killing people softly where they feel like they have to suck it up, push it down and not go there for fear that they will be considered weak, not competitive enough, or as someone who does not care enough about the workplace.”
Moorehead-Slaughter said employers should look for tangible things that could be built into a company’s structure to improve mental health for workers.
While mental-health benefits and awareness are important, she said tangential issues like child care and support for other stressors employees may be facing shouldn’t be overlooked in the equation.
She said smart employers are listening to their employees to avoid having their staffs wither away. If not, she said, employees have more leverage to leave than ever before.
“They are listening to what managers say, but they’re also looking at what managers do,” Moorehead-Slaughter said.
“If you get the impression — or you actually know because you talk to other employees — that managers are up around the clock and they expect you to be responding, online around the clock, virtually, if you’re not on site, that’s a heads up.”
