Expert details how being a 'mental health conduit' can be an effective move for managers
As much as managers want to be able to provide all the supports that their workers need, they do not have the answer to everything, according o an expert.
In the subject of mental health, even managers themselves are not immune to these problems. And they can be in a very difficult position, says best-selling author on burnout and employee wellbeing Jennifer Moss.
“As a manager, one of the scariest things is what happens if someone comes to me in a crisis and I don't know what to do or I am burnt out myself. And I'm a manager that's exhausted, and I'm leading an exhausted team and I'm detached at this point,” she says in HRDTV’s Thought Leaders series video, available for free right here.
“I don't want them to feel like I don't care about them. But I also am in empathic distress… in these experiences, managers and leaders are really sandwiched in a very difficult situation.”
That’s why employers should try to create positive and supportive cultures. To do that, employers should turn to data, she says.
“We need to be thinking much further upstream about how we’re going to be preventing burnout, preventing chronic stress. We tend to look at these downstream ways of solving it with programs that put the self-care piece back on the individuals,” Moss says.
“If you’re really looking at the definition of burnout, chronic stress, it’s institutional workplace stress left unmanaged, and those root causes are workload, overwork. It’s a lack of community.”
One way to go for managers is to become mental health conduits and educate workers about the resources that are available to them, she says.
“We just need to be communicating more about… what's in our employee system program... Because the more that they know about them, the more they access them, the more mentally healthy they are. And then it also removes the burden from a manager to feel like they have to be dealing with people in crisis, which is not what they were trained for.
“And we've seen more managers when they feel like a conduit, that they're more likely to provide support and be more open and vulnerable themselves.”
Moss also discussed the matters of burnout and the correlation between wellbeing and engagement and productivity.
Watch the full video today for free right here.
