Employee Mental Health Solutions to Combat the Great Resignation

COVID-19 impacted companies everywhere leaving many employees to struggle with mental health issues. Here's how leaders can provide mental health solutions.

Employee Mental Health Solutions to Combat the Great Resignation

The mental health of employees remains a top priority in any workplace. Taking time to check in with your team is key to providing a healthy workplace culture and retaining your talent. Over the last year, a lot has changed within everyone’s lives, COVID-19 has impacted company practices everywhere leaving many employees to struggle with mental health issues including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and burnout. This is causing many people to make big changes, some of which involve switching jobs which have led to what is known as “The Great Resignation”. So what can leaders do to reinforce their teams and retain their talent as they continue to face threats to their mental health?

What can leaders do?

As a leader, your role is always to support your employees. As far as supporting their mental health, many skills you already utilize as a leader will coincide with strategizing your mental health check-ins. The first step to this is recognizing mental health as a collective issue that your organization needs to address and preparing fellow leaders and management to learn how to help. The more members of your team on board, the more support is available to strengthen your workplace- this will contribute to a healthy work environment for all employees and management alike.

How does mental health relate to employee retention?

Over the course of the last year, employees have undergone stressful and uncertain times. The impact of COVID-19 is not lost on any of us, many organizations had to undergo serious infrastructure changes involving layoffs, furloughs, and remote transitions. Through all these changes many people are deciding to move on, resulting in a great loss of irreplaceable talent to many organizations, and from this sparked The Great Resignation. Providing mental health check-ins will not only show employees that you care for their well-being, but it will also provide an opportunity to evaluate their current feelings on their position and how your organization can help to meet their needs on a professional and personal level.

How to Help:

Here are a few suggestions to begin developing your mental health awareness plan:

  1. Start with regular check-ins. By making it a point to catch up with employees on a normal basis, you establish a more comfortable relationship allowing room for more conversion. It’s important to ask specific questions about how you can support them, going beyond just asking how they’ve been. Giving them the chance to tell you what they need and addressing how you’re able to help can make all the difference- make the effort to show you truly care.
  2. Build a sense of comfort when talking about mental health. It’s important to establish that discussions about mental health with supervisors are an important part of communication. Being able to disclose struggles can have a major impact on worker efficiency and overall health. Talking about mental health with your organization is a great way to normalize these conversations and ease into them when it comes time for one-on-one discussions.
  3. Cultivate DEI into your mental health strategy. Based on race, ethnicity, gender, or any type of diverse background employees may have, they will require different types of mental health services. Making it a point to be aware of the unique needs of each individual will be beneficial to your entire team and all the diverse members that it’s made of. Representing this understanding will nourish your DEI strategy and give all employees an opportunity to seek help.
  4. Prioritize a work-life balance. Above all else, communicating the importance of balancing work with life is the main point to get across to employees. Enabling them to have a healthy work culture is the best way to encourage taking time to evaluate mental health awareness. Being a model of this with things such as setting times to log off, working on boundaries, and establishing healthy workloads are examples of tactics to help address the mental health crisis.

Looking to start a conversation about mental health in your workplace but not sure where to start? Retain and support your talent today, Contact one of our experts to learn more about leadership development training and employee wellbeing.

Karla Chin
Karla Chin is the Director of Total Well-being at Exude. She leverages 15 years of professional experience, training, and expertise to help organizations implement strategies and offer deliverables focused on a “whole employee” and integrative approach to well-being. Karla started her career in the benefits industry. Her exposure to increasing occurrences of health insurance claims and critical illnesses caused her to discover her passion for wellness and desire to help improve the well-being of individuals. Karla has designed and implemented a wellness training program that focuses on resilience and self-leadership. This program, give employees the skills and training to become effective self-leaders. She’s been featured on CBS News as a health & lifestyle expert, presented in front of 5,000+ individuals at globally attended conferences, and has had the opportunity to deliver her coaching services and workplace well-being services to clients from all over North America.