Corporate organisations, today, are focusing on helping their employees manage their health better by adopting corporate wellness programs inclusive of clinical improvement initiatives around certain measures such as blood pressure, Body Mass Index (BMI), cholesterol, glucose, and smoking cessation.
While these measures, once achieved and maintained, can help prevent cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and other illnesses that increase healthcare costs for employers, mental health is not usually a focus area in the most corporate wellness programs.
Mental health and emotional health are not as easy to be measured like physical health via tests like blood pressure but it may affect an employee's health and lead to the same or severe outcomes like any physical health disorder or disease, the focus on ensuring mental health in the corporate world needs to be increasing.
Ensuring happy and satisfied customers is every company's mission; however, employees are a key part of it. The unhappy or unfulfilled employees tend to have poor interpersonal relationships, commitment to the organization, and not a sense of meaning or purpose among the parts of their job.
WHAT LEADS TO POOR MENTAL HEALTH?
With work norms like long working hours or employers discouraging employees from taking earned vacation time, the employees are not left with opportunities to find a healthy work and personal life balance in their lives, which may leave them feeling stressed out, discouraged, angry, and unhappy. There can be other reasons in a corporate environment that may directly or indirectly lead to undermining one's emotional wellness.
EFFECTS OF POOR MENTAL HEALTH IN THE ORGANIZATION
Poor mental health caused by stress at work or poor management of work and personal life can lead to various symptoms of depression affecting their efficiency. Productivity loss, absenteeism, job abandonment, and higher turnover are directly linked to poor mental health.
BENEFITS OF GOOD WORKING ENVIRONMENT ON EMPLOYEES
A working environment inclusive breaks, allowing good interpersonal relationships with a co-worker and other features of good working space helps in:
ENSURING BETTER MENTAL HEALTH
Before implementing any mental health programs, every employer should have a complete assessment of their organizational culture. One should acknowledge the cultural drivers that influence people's resiliency and their ability to be emotionally well at work.
ADVANTAGE TO BOTH EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES
While these programs are helpful for employees to ensure managed workplace stress levels and overall mental health, they also benefit the employers as they are at a significant advantage over those who do not provide such benefits. These employers are likely to have lower incidents of job burnout, onsite violence, and workplace injury.
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