The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the focus on employee wellbeing and mental health across organizations globally. With isolation, anxiety, stress and burnout on the rise, employees are increasingly looking to their employers for more holistic support.
As CHROs step up to meet this growing need, the question becomes – how can they effectively promote workforce wellbeing at scale? Based on emerging best practices, here are key strategies for CHROs to consider:
Normalize the Conversation
The first step is encouraging open dialogue around wellbeing, reducing stigma so that employees feel safe speaking up and seeking help. This starts with messaging from leadership emphasizing that mental health is integral to overall health and productivity. Promoting employee assistance programs, wellness challenges and mental health days signals that the organization is invested in supporting this journey with no judgments attached.
Ongoing pulse surveys and focus groups also provide insights into evolving workforce attitudes, challenges and suggestions. Keeping a finger on the pulse allows CHROs to continuously adapt strategies to meet changing needs.
Prioritize Work-Life Harmony
With remote and hybrid work models likely here to stay, maintaining boundaries between work and life has become even more crucial for healthy, sustainable ways of working. CHROs play an important role in shaping cultural mindsets around what it means to deliver results versus just putting in face time.
Implementing organization-wide digital detox policies, guardrails around after-hours work and modeling such priorities themselves sets the tone from the top. Promoting unlimited vacation and volunteer days provides employees more flexibility in managing their schedules. Training managers to spot burnout warning signs is also critical intervention.
Offer Proactive Support
Rather than just reactively offering mental health support when employees are already in crisis mode, the goal should be to proactively foster individual and collective resilience on an ongoing basis.
Examples include providing access life coaches, counseling, meditation classes and mental health first aid training. Embedding such offerings into onboarding and management check-ins normalizes their uptake versus leaving participation entirely voluntary.
Gamifying activities like step challenges, sleep tracking and breathing exercises promotes everyday wellbeing habits. Extending access to mental health services for family members also acknowledges stresses employees face in their personal lives.
Measure Impact with Care
While collecting mental health metrics allows CHROs to gauge program effectiveness, handling such sensitive data with care is vital for maintaining trust. Surveys should center perceptions of organizational support and sentiments rather than probing for personal details or diagnoses.
Any data collected should have clear use cases for driving decisions around support offerings while upholding privacy and security. And rather than tying mental health metrics tightly to performance management, the focus should be wholly on enabling employees to be their best selves at work and beyond.
The path ahead requires empathy, diligence and commitment from CHROs to build workplace cultures truly supportive of mental health. But the payoffs – in terms of inspiring greater meaning, happiness, retention and discretionary effort across the workforce – make this mission invaluable. While challenging, focusing efforts brings enormous opportunities for mutually positive impact on both employees and bottom lines.
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