#24 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Managing Well-Being At Work

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU HEAR

• “I find my work purposeful but I am still feeling really exhausted deep inside and feeling like I have to quit. Is this normal?”

• “I hate my job. Everyday here makes me feel a bit more dead inside.”

• “I like my job but it’s the politics that really put me off.”

• “Work is ok but I feel restless - like I need a challenge. I’m kinda bored actually and I’ve started looking at other jobs on LinkedIn on my breaks but it makes me feel really guilty about it because my boss just gave me a raise too.”

• “I don’t know how to tell them I’m going through stuff….my anxiety is flaring up again….but I’m not sure anyone wants to hear about it especially when things are getting hectic and everyone is stressed.”

…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of Managing Workplace Well-Being.

THINK // 3 insights from the field

😇 THE GOOD THING about the pandemic years is that it normalised workplace conversations around managing better mental well-being.

There are 3 key terms people mention interchangably that is important to differentiate:

• Mental health:
  a more specific term that refers mostly to our brain's health and emotional stability

• Mental illness:
  refers collectively to all diagnosable mental disorders. These are health conditions that affect parts of the brain and involve significant changes in thinking, emotion and/or behavior that cause distress and impact your ability to function in social, work or family activities.

  • Just like heart disease and diabetes, mental illnesses are medical illnesses that may stem from genetic and biological causes and can be treated effectively, especially with early detection and intervention.

• Mental well-being/wellness:
  a much broader term that covers all aspects of our overall positive functioning. It is “more than the absence of mental illness”.

  • For instance, in positive psychology, well-being is framed as the presence of PERMA+: Positive emotions, Engagement in the ‘flow’, Relationship, Meaning, Achievement + Overall Health

Let’s imagine how these terms play out with two people at Organisation X:

• Ana has on-going mental health struggles. She was diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety since her teens. She has learnt how to manage it over the years through a mix of therapy, care for her physical health and medication. She also chose to exit a high-stress sector for a more evenly paced one where she still gets to do work she enjoys and is good at. She has found workplace BFFs that keep her going when things get difficult. She still has her ups and downs but she generally feels she is still able to experience more thriving in her mental well-being.

• Then, there is Beng who has never struggled with mental health. Beng was feeling on top of the world, excelling in the best way, so when he was assigned a big work project that could ‘make or break his career’, he was pumped. But with each curve-ball and misjudgment he made, his confidence plummeted in a way that shook him. He is losing his sleep, his appetite - and his original joy and hope in being able to lead the project in the way he imagined. He tries to handle things alone and actively avoids all attempts by his colleagues to talk to him about what’s going on. He binges on his bad habits to cope and feels even worse after. Ben is alternating between surviving and struggling with poor mental health, even if he has no mental illness.

It is good for us to see mental well-being exists on a spectrum - and we are all on that spectrum, capable of sliding up and down depending on circumstance.

To understand where you might place yourself or a person you are supporting at work (like Ana and Beng) on the spectrum of mental well-being, you can use a mental health continuum model.

• This is one that we chose for our resource kit on Reimagining Mental Well-being at Work:

• This is another model that is useful if you are trying to discern whether self-care and social support is an adequate response - or whether more professional care is the most appropriate response:

It may be a hard fact for some of us to digest but everyone is on that same mental health spectrum, capable of sliding up and down depending on situation and circumstance.

According to a Singapore Mental Health Study 2016,

• 1 in 7 Singaporeans will experience a mental health condition in their lifetime.

• The top 3 most common disorders in Singapore are Major Depressive Disorder (1 in 16), Alcohol Abuse (1 in 24) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (1 in 28)

• more than 75% of people facing mental health struggles in Singapore do not seek professional help.

In your workplace, it's more likely than not that you have a couple of colleagues just entering a mental health challenge, consistently managing an on-going mental health condition or exiting a season of profound mental health struggle.

Some may be your peers, some may be your ground staff - some may even be your leaders and bosses.

Managing mental well-being at work is not one person's job. It is a collective experience and needs collective effort - and it's a very good thing we are talking about getting this right more.

🤬 THE BAD THING is that many of us are still guilty of unhelpful responses as we figure out how to get better at supporting workplace well-being.

In the Reimagining Mental Well-being at Work grounded research project that my team at Common Ground did with Studio Dojo, we reported 8 insights into what are unhelpful responses and helpful responses that people got from their organisations when they raised up mental well-being issues.

I have condensed some of them into 4 Cultural Check-in Questions (and key verbatim quotes from our interviews) here to help us explore whether our work environment helps or hinders people’s well-being:

4 Cultural Check-Ins For Workplace Well-Being

1. Does our current pace and approach to work send a message that “We are here to help you Thrive” - or “We are here to just help you Survive”?

• We found that most mental health support at work tends to kick in only after employees are obviously struggling or in crisis. There is much less attention paid to enabling employees who are surviving to go into thriving and excelling.

• There may be a historical acceptance that ‘our norm in this sector/organisation is (surviving) - and it is crazy for them to expect (anything beyond that) here’. This can make it harder for an authentic intergenerational conversation between the younger and older members of an organisation.

• WHAT IF the old pace and approach to work has always been damaging and unsustainable? WHAT IF helping each other thrive - rather than just survive - can actually help our performance and productivity issues?
  

2. Is our current culture psychologically safe enough for employees to disclose they need help?

• “Help me help you” is the employers’ earnest plea as they struggle with employees who keep silent on issues they are going through.

• But the weight of disclosure that “I am struggling here” is a heavy burden for anyone (staff, manager or leader) to bear alone. There can be implications on your career progression and peer acceptance.

• Disclosure requires an ongoing practice of high psychological safety in the workplace. If there is a precedence of people normalising discussions of how they are doing and what help they need, it may be easier to table their struggles.

• If people already find it hard to say “I need help” for non-mental health related things, it will be near impossible for them to ask for help in something as vulnerable as mental health support.

• WHAT IF helping each other normalise sharing about “where I need help” in low stake, less vulnerable areas can help us more safely disclose our need for help in more high stake, vulnerable areas? WHAT IF sharing about our struggles can give someone else permission to share about theirs?

3. Are we using good work performance as an (inaccurate) indicator that we are “doing fine” at work?

• Work performance is the most commonly used signal of determining an employee’s mental wellbeing even though it is not the most accurate. This is why employers/team-mates only intervene when work performance is visibly deteriorating.

• Employees themselves struggling with mental health conditions may also presume their well-being is tied to productivity and only seek help when their performance is on the line. 

• If their mental health condition somehow boosts their performance (e.g. high functioning anxiety, obsessive-compulsiveness), they may even believe curing themselves of that condition will impact their career negatively and they would rather suffer personally than professionally.

• WHAT IF we designed better indicators (beyond work performance) to measure and evaluate how well someone is doing at work? WHAT IF we help each other spot signs of what poor mental well-being looks like in high performing people?
  

4. Do we deal with mental well-being issues at work in a gradual, humane and collaborative way - or in a knee-jerk, ‘professional’ and one-sided fashion?

• If we do not support people through their mental health challenges at work early on, we may see disclosure happen in an unintended, drastic or intense way e.g. a panic attack, breakdown or major work failure.

• This can cause people at work to go into quick, drastic and unhelpful intervention such as redirecting of significant work tasks or social isolation to allow the struggling person to recover. This is mostly based on perceptions of what people think are helpful - without involving the struggling person in the planning of solutions.

• People who are struggling usually appreciate holistic, ongoing and longer-term ongoing support from their teams, bosses and organisations. This can look like Employee Assistance Programmes that provide access to confidential individual counselling sessions.

• WHAT IF we integrated processes into our workplace that allows people to seek mental-wellbeing support in an on-going, humane and collaborative way?
  

😈 THE UGLY THING about managing mental well-being at work is that it is too often just seen from the lens of individual choice and agency.

We should be healthily suspicious of any organisation/leader who sells to us an ideology that the best fix to mental well-being is simply individual-level changes like practicing gratitude, volunteering, breathing techniques, exercise etc.

If mental well-being struggles is a recurring theme at our workplace (or in our sector!), we must acknowledge there may be broader, system level reasons why people struggle with their mental well-being.

For a workplace to support our mental well-being, it needs to be

• committed at the highest organisational levels to do the work,

• ready to provide the relevant resources: budget, manpower etc.

• continually curious about appropriate knowledge of what it takes to support people’s ability to thrive and excel in the workplace

  

With knowledge, resources and commitment, we can have more permission to question how our organisations and systems’ practices, policies or processes impact people’s ability to maintain or increase their mental well-being.

Examples of organisation level practices, policies and processes we can explore:

• Does a workplace pay people enough to take care of their mental well-being via external vendors? If not, does it provide mental well-being benefits such as an Employee Assistance Programme?

• Does a workplace provide reasonable time, space and pace for people to rest from work either through off-days, managing over-time etc?

• Does a workplace shield, enable or protect powerful individuals in the system who create mentally unhealthy, psychologically unsafe environments that put employees into survival mode? Do these individuals have a track record of “burning through human resources”?

• Does a workplace appoint psychologically safe and empowering people into human resource/organisational development leadership positions? How much decision-making power do the human resource/organisational development leaders have in the system?

• Does a workplace provide psychologically safe avenues for employees to provide feedback of “what’s not working” for them and work through solutions of “what could work better”?

It is definitely not easy for any workplace to take up the task of supporting mental well-being at the system level such that more people can thrive rather than just survive.

But it certainly is meaningful, much-needed - and might just be the game-changer you need for your culture.

To paraphrase Brianna Wiest’s popular quote on self-care:

FEEL // 2 links to help you feel less alone

WATCH / LISTEN Common Ground’s podcast episode where we chat with Kun Liang, Lead of Communications, Marketing and Partnerships at Playeum on how even as a millenial middle manager, he has found a way to not just survive but thrive at work:

DOWNLOAD + READ Common Ground x Studio Dojo’s grounded research into Reimagining Mental Well-Being At the Workplace:

DO // 1 strategy to try this week

The next time you see someone “not doing well” at work:

HOLD SAFE SPACE, ASK + LISTEN:
WHAT’S GOING ON AT THE PERSONAL LEVEL

• Could you share with me what’s going on for you? As you listen, consider where they might be on the mental health continuum: are they in crisis, struggling, surviving? Do they need self-care, social-care or professional care?

• What would be most helpful to you right now? Who would you like to talk to about this? Even if you have a strong opinion of what’s the best thing to do, don’t make decisions on their behalf. Listen to their preference, share with them what is possible and support them in finding what’s/who’s helpful for them.

IF APPROPRIATE: ASK + LISTEN TO
WHAT’S GOING ON AT THE SYSTEMIC LEVEL

• Do you know of any others who may be going through similar things as you? How long has that been going on?

• Do you see any current practices, policies or processes that we need to adjust so that it’s more helpful to your situation?

• Do you see any new practices, policies or processes that we can introduce so that it’s more helpful to situations like this?