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More Than Half Of Employees Are Afraid To Discuss Their Mental Health With Their Boss, New Data Shows

11 Aug 2020 8:07 AM | Bill Brewer (Administrator)

Businessman holding a head

Mark Murphy | August 7, 2020 

It doesn't take a clinical psychologist to know that employees' mental health has declined precipitously during this pandemic. And even though I'm married to a clinical psychologist, the warning signs are apparent to virtually all laypeople.

Whether it's fatigue, loss of focus, anxiety, or guilt, the pandemic has taken a huge toll on our collective mental well-being. And there's an abundance of data to support that claim.

Paychex's recent study of more than 1,000 employees, called Mental Health at Work During COVID-19, discovered that not only has employee mental health suffered during the pandemic but that employees are afraid to discuss those effects with their bosses.

Out of the 1,017 full-time employees who took the survey, more than half of respondents (54%) said they felt uncomfortable talking to their managers and supervisors about mental health. And even worse is that 30% of respondents feared that discussing their mental health could lead to being fired or furloughed, and 29% thought discussing their issues could cost them a promotion.

Now, employees did share their concerns about their declining mental health, just not with their bosses or HR. According to 35% of employees who discussed their mental health concerns, they discussed their issues with coworkers. Only 21% discussed mental health with a supervisor, and just 5% said they spoke with an HR representative.

This should be troubling news for every leader. While it's great that lots of employees feel comfortable discussing their issues with their coworkers, it's disturbing that having a conversation with the boss is seen as so risky.

And yet, we shouldn't be surprised. In the study Why CEOs Get Fired, we discovered that executives who received bad news early were far less likely to get fired than those whose employees avoided disclosing harsh realities. In other words, while it's nice to hear positive news all the time, if you do not hear bad news, you're probably in real trouble.

And yet, notwithstanding those findings, we encountered an untold number of senior executives who simply wouldn't countenance bad news.

Let's be honest for a moment; in the past few months, have you felt a bit more anxious about your career than you were six months ago? Have you felt a bit less productive than you were six months ago? Have you felt, even a little bit, more irritable than you were six months ago?

Those are all warning signs of declining mental health. And if you haven't felt any of those, then you are truly unique, because virtually every worker has recently suffered at least a few of those symptoms.

The question isn't whether your employees have felt a decline in their mental health; the Paychex study is clear proof that lots of employees are suffering. The big question for leaders, and HR departments, is whether we're willing to hear those concerns and act appropriately (i.e., without punishing employees for raising their issues).

The Paychex data also found that nearly half of employees reported worsening mental health, motivation, morale, productivity and stress since the pandemic outbreak. So the big test for leaders is, do you hear those concerns? Have at least a third of employees come to you to share their concerns about increased stress or decreased productivity? And if not, how are you going to get them to share their issues?

We know from the Paychex data that remote employees have suffered a greater decrease in motivation than in-person employees. And we know from the more than 20,000 people that have taken the quiz "Is Your Personality Suited To Working Remotely Or In The Office?” that remote employees are more likely to say that, "being 'average' in my work is a truly terrible thought for me."

I want you to imagine that you're a high-achieving remote employee (this is not a stretch for most of my readers). Now imagine that, because of the pandemic, you're feeling stress levels you haven't experienced before; your kids are home, you're afraid of catching a potentially fatal disease, you're feeling socially isolated, etc. In the background of all these stressful feelings, you've got this idea that you need to deliver excellent work (e.g., being an average employee is not good enough for you).

You're experiencing exogenous stress, and at the same time, you're feeling some self-recrimination for not being your best self. This is a wildly complex array of emotions. And if you don't feel like you've got a smart trusted advisor to guide you through this psychological tumult, you're likely to feel far worse than someone who's mindlessly punching the clock.

So again, I ask every leader, are you hearing about your employees' deep concerns? Are they proactively sharing their expected declines in mental health? If they're not coming to you, as their leader, they may be approaching their coworkers. But they may also not be approaching anyone at all. And if you care about achieving your team's maximal productivity and performance, that should concern you greatly.

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Source; Forbes

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2020/08/07/more-than-half-of-employees-are-afraid-to-discuss-their-mental-health-with-their-boss-new-data-shows/#4faddcfc694a

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