After two years of health crisis, we would like to turn the page and believe in a brighter future. But this long period of an anxiety-provoking climate marked people’s minds and lastingly transformed thework organization, like our relationship with the company. Many employees are looking for meaning; others are overdue.
According to the latest barometer from Empreinte Humaine, two and a half million employees are burnt out. It is high time to change our vision of mental health to better support employees, who remain the most valuable asset of companies.
A social issue
2.55 million employees in severe burnout. The number is confusing. And isn’t it, moreover, the huge tree that hides the forest? How many employees, without being in “severe” burnout, are not doing well today? According to the same survey, 38% of employees are in psychological distress, a recognized mental health indicator that overlaps symptoms of depression and exhaustion. Faced with this reality, companies can no longer hide their face and must take up the subject of the mental health of employees. It is clear that the psychological support lines have had their day, that they are largely insufficient, unsuitable, and that the challenge is to have a systemic approach, disseminated in all strata of the organization, combining awareness, measurement , group and individual support. Because well-being is also contagious, managers and HRDs must rethink how to support all of their employees, those who are suffering, and all the others.
It is time, indeed, to develop a largely inclusive culture of mental health at work, to take this issue out of the gray area of judgment, to change the discourse too: mental health does not only concern colleagues who are burnt out. If employees who are well follow a support program to take care of their mental health, this effectively trivializes the right to the opposite trend: those who are not well and who would hesitate to let it be known are drawn into a virtuous circle which consists neither more nor less to take care of oneself, to no longer repress one’s vulnerability. It’s okay not to feel well; it is urgent to make it known.
Unlock speech and emotions
For this, organizations must obviously adopt the right processes, the right tools, the appropriate support programs. Find their ambassadors too, managers, HR or not, who will be keen to make the psychological well-being of employees a priority. A manager who speaks openly about mental health as a subject that concerns everyone helps to free speech and promotes awareness. Similarly, a leader who testifies to the benefits he personally derives from such individual support systems could sweep away the reservations of those who remain silent for fear of being judged.
To say that mental health concerns all employees is not only to allow those who are doing well to continue to do well, it is to destigmatize those who aspire to get better. Because well-being at work is not just an achievement for some and an achievement for others. It is also, and perhaps above all, paying attention on a daily basis to preserving one’s mental health and protecting oneself against psychosocial risks, for example by developing protective factors without which one is often led to block one’s emotions, by a self-defense mechanism. We can indeed be so convinced that everything is fine, that the stress is manageable, the pressure bearable, that we do not see the burn out coming.
Take action to better prevent
Often, moreover, it is not the employees who have been identified as more fragile who crack, but those who have silenced suffering for too long, who have repressed their emotions or the expression of daily stress, pulling on the rope until it breaks. Hence, again, the need for upstream prevention and monitoring systems that include and involve all employees; we are stuck in a culture of curative action, one-off action and individual solutions, instead of prevention, long-term action and collective logic. You have to understand that it is not necessary to go wrong (or to wait to go wrong) to be accompanied. The important thing is to adapt the support to the need, or even to the absence of need, to personalize the follow-up and to bring the employee to appropriate the approach, to ensure that he becomes both the actor and the promoter.
The promotion of a positive culture of mental health certainly comes up against old and strangely painful representations of the professional world, but time does its work: two years of health crisis and upheavals in the work order have shaken the old world . A new world is being born which gives increasing importance to the psychological well-being of employees that ping-pong tables are no longer enough to attract or retain. The company of tomorrow will be accountable for the mental health of its employees, or it will not be.
By Jérôme Crest, CEO and co-founder of Holivia
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