Studies have shown that mental health has a massive impact on worker productivity. The team at Body and Mind Health Partners of Las Vegas wants you to know how you can improve mental health in your workplace.
Untreated anxiety and depression dramatically reduce the efficiency, work quality and productivity of the average worker, a trend that’s only worsened since the beginning of the pandemic as people worry about issues like job security, inflation, COVID testing and COVID vaccines.
The upside is that mental health issues such as anxiety, depression and excessive stress are treatable. Access to a licensed therapist and mental health doctors through a wellness clinic that practices integrative medicine can lead to lasting mental health improvements that have a positive impact on worker satisfaction and, by extension, your bottom line.
Encourage Mindfulness
Mindfulness — a self-reflective, placid state of mind most often associated with meditation — can insulate your brain from the toxic effects of stress and emotional burnout. If you think of the mind as a muscle, mindfulness makes it stronger, more flexible and more resistant to injury.
Mindfulness-based therapy can also improve a worker’s ability to perceive their mental and emotional states, making it easier to accurately self-regulate and self-manage their output. It works by de-exciting the nervous system, creating a calm mental space for self-reflection and assessment. In a fast-paced, emotionally charged work environment, this sort of perspective can be the difference between burnout and flourishing.
Although there are mindfulness-based therapies, simple mindfulness can be a cost-effective mental health measure, as it can be achieved with nothing more than a quiet, dimly lit meditation room.
Mandate Mental Health Wellness Days
Even if you empower your employees to take personal or mental health days, some workers may feel guilty or reluctant to take them. Some may even feel like it’s unfair to put the onus on the worker to initiate these wellness holidays. This overlaps with a larger trend of American workers taking less time off overall.
Once you have a cultural understanding of the usefulness of mental health wellness, it can be hugely effective if management takes the initiative to designate wellness or mental health days. It’s an easy way to overcome workers’ reluctance to take time off, as well as to signal to your workforce that you’re concerned about their mental health and are willing to take concrete actions to improve it.
Cultivate a Nontoxic Workplace
A lot of the suggestions above come down to having the right workplace culture in place. Having mindfulness initiatives, mental health days or wellness breaks built into each day will feel organic if you already have the right culture. A positive culture can be effective even if it doesn’t lead to specific initiatives, as stress and anxiety can be soothed just by empathy and compassion from coworkers and management.
Having those fundamental values in place is a lot easier if both employees and management have access to a wellness clinic like Body and Mind Health Partners. Contact our office today to learn more about mental health in the workplace or to make an appointment.
