Prioritizing Mental Health in the Workplace

Many people still are dealing with the psychological and emotional effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Add to this discouraging news about the economy and other world issues, employees are experiencing instability in significant areas of their professional and personal lives like never before.

The Conference Board conducted a 2022 mental health survey of over 1,100 workers. Fifty percent of the respondents reported deteriorating mental health since the coronavirus pandemic began. Only 38% of the workers felt their manager adequately addressed their mental health concerns. Merely 29% of respondents whose companies offered mental health support found the resources helpful.

In response to what employers can do to help, 82% of the workers mentioned offering managers training on how to address mental health concerns. Sixty-one percent of respondents said increased manager trust would improve their mental health.

As a result, managers must actively listen to and provide support for their employees for their teams to succeed. This involves managers advocating for their employees’ needs to create caring, empathetic work cultures.

Follow these guidelines to prioritize mental health throughout your organization.

Embrace Change

Being comfortable with change positively impacts employee engagement, morale, and leadership styles. This includes modeling behavior that is open to and accepting of the transforming work world.

  • Regularly talk with your employees about what they need to feel safe at work and excel in their roles.
  • Determine how your team members feel about their workloads.
  • Talk about potential feelings of disengagement or burnout.
  • Find out how you can more effectively support your employees.
  • Ask for constructive feedback on how you handle situations.
  • Encourage your employees to ask for what they need.

Update Work Practices

Assess the policies, processes, and systems that no longer serve your employees. Examples include set work hours, limited leave policies, and not feeling comfortable providing or receiving feedback.

  • Educate your team on the resources available for mental health support.
  • Advocate for flexible work hours, more comprehensive leave policies, and psychological safety for employees to give and receive constructive feedback.
  • Actively seek new information on employee-first work cultures.
  • Use data to support your decisions.

Advocate for Mental Health Support

Talk with your employees about your own mental health issues. Include how you seek and receive support both inside and outside the organization.

  • Share your methods for coping with workplace stress.
  • Discuss your feelings of safety when sharing your thoughts with your team or manager.
  • Be honest about how you are feeling and when you are having a bad day.
  • Encourage your employees to take time for self-care throughout the day and at night.
  • Emphasize why building a culture of mental health support matters.
  • Demonstrate how everyone needs to be invested in building a culture of mental health support.

Need More Ideas?

Embracing change, updating your work practices, and advocating for mental health support are ways to prioritize mental wellness in your workplace. Modeling these behaviors helps reduce the risk of burnout. This increases employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

If you’d like other ideas, check out our previous blog from Mental Health Awareness Month in April.

We’re here to offer more support to your team. Make Casey Accounting & Finance Resources part of your talent acquisition process. Find out more today.

 

How to Get the Most Productivity Out of Your Meetings

A report by Harvard Business Review showed that more than 70% of the senior managers surveyed said most meetings are inefficient and unproductive. Among the top reasons were they keep managers from finishing their work, take away time for deep thinking, and result in lost opportunities to unite the team.

A study conducted by Beenote showed that 80% of the employees surveyed had problems in at least one stage of the meeting lifecycle. A lack of minute-keeping, participant preparation, team communication, follow-up tasks, and finishing on time made most meetings unproductive.

As a result, reducing the amount of time spent in meetings can increase employee satisfaction and productivity. You can use these tips to get started.

 

Follow these guidelines to increase productivity during meetings.

Limit the Number of Participants

Keep your meetings between seven and nine participants. Smaller numbers promote greater participation than larger numbers.

Invite only the necessary employees to participate. Smaller groups can make faster decisions and accomplish more than larger groups.

Advance the Agenda  

Send participants an agenda well before the meeting. Include the meeting goal and anticipated outcomes.

Limit the number of discussion topics. This helps the meeting stay on schedule and finish on time.

Begin on Time

Start the meeting at the designated time. Avoid recapping the discussion for latecomers. Do not let them in 15 minutes past the start time.

Beginning on time enforces the habit of employees showing up on time. This helps keep the meeting on track and within the timeframe.

Designate Action Items

Write down specific follow-up tasks according to the decisions made during the meeting. Include which employee is responsible for each task and what the deadline is.

These action items help prepare employees for the next meeting. They can more effectively report on their progress and results.

Enforce Time Limits

Keep each meeting at one hour or less. End the meeting on time, even if items are left on the agenda.

Enforcing meeting time limits lets employees more effectively plan their work day. It also encourages meeting planners to include only the necessary discussion topics.

Send Follow-Up Information

Let employees know whether you will send additional details about the topics discussed during the meeting. This encourages employees to participate more in the discussion and take fewer notes.

Ensure you send the information so employees can review it. This reinforces the discussion topics from the meeting.

 

Need to Hire HR Professionals?

Limiting the number of participants, advancing the agenda, and starting on time increase the productivity of meetings. Designating action items, finishing on time, and sending follow-up information increase the likelihood of implementing the decisions made during the meeting.

If you need to add HR professionals to your team, involve Arlington Resources in your hiring process. Find out more today.

 

When Will the Talent Shortage End? Maybe Never, and Here’s Why!

In the first part of this two-part series, we share insights from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) on why the economic and labor numbers are unfamiliar with the ongoing talent shortage.

Even though there are plenty of predictors for employment and unemployment, most hiring managers rely on the unemployment rate to determine if their company will struggle to acquire talent. Since the pandemic began, the traditional indicators that usually moved together aren’t. Have they gone haywire? Are magnetic fields affecting the numbers? The answers are no and no.

How to Interpret the Conflicting Numbers

Alex Domash and Lawrence H. Summers, both from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, have studied all the predictors and indicators and conclude, in their NBER working paper, that the “labor market tightness is likely to contribute significantly to inflationary [wage] pressure in the United States for some time to come.”

They note that, “Economists have typically turned to common slack measures, such as the unemployment rate or the job vacancy rate, to assess labor market tightness and predict nominal wage growth. Historically, measures of slack on the supply-side, like the unemployment rate and the prime-age (25-54) nonemployment rate[1], have moved in tandem with measures of slack on the demand-side, such as the job vacancy rate and the quits rate, meaning that different indicators gave broadly corroborative signals of labor market tightness. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, the supply-side indicators and the demand-side indicators have diverged significantly. While the unemployment rate and prime-age nonemployment rate remain elevated at late-2017 levels and imply modest degrees of slack, the job vacancy rate and quits rate have surged to series highs[2] and imply a very tight labor market. The unemployment rate does not adequately capture all movements in the labor market that are significant for wage inflation.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell suggests looking at other indicators, like the prime-age employment- (25-54 years old) to-population ratio, to better understand the presumed lack of candidates every company is feeling. So, it’s not just a matter of how many people are employable, it’s a correlation between the population and those who want to work. More on this in a minute.

Does This Have Something to Do With Soaring Wages?

Quite simply, yes. Domash and Summers comment that, “A high vacancy rate signals a high demand for labor and puts upward pressure on wages as firms compete to attract workers. A high quit rate signals that workers are confident enough to leave their jobs to search for a better opportunity, and can put upward pressure on wages since job switchers drive up wages as they move up the job ladder.” Let’s see a show of hands from the hiring managers out there who can relate to this.

Domash and Summers note their research indicates that “estimated wage inflation in the fourth quarter of 2021 is the highest it’s been in the last 20 years.” They also “simulated wage growth in 2022 and 2023 under the assumption that the vacancy rate, the quits rate, and the inflation rate remain the same…nominal wage growth under these assumptions is projected to increase dramatically over the next two years, surpassing six percent wage inflation by 2023.”

Where are the Workers?

Understanding indicators and predictors is one thing, but we are all feeling the pain of finding workers. Here’s the reality. Domash and Summers outline six factors as to where the workers have gone, and chances are, they might never come back. Those factors are:

  • Shifts in demographic structures (population aging specifically) = 1.3 million workers;
  • Covid-19 health concerns = 1.5 million workers;
  • Immigration restrictions = 1.4 million workers;
  • Excess retirements = 1.3 million workers;
  • Reduced incentives to work = 1 million workers; and
  • Covid-19 vaccine mandates = 0.4 million workers.

At the same time, they “project demand-side indicators such as the vacancy to unemployment ratio to continue to be very high over the next year.”

Conclusion

Domash and Summers predict that “the majority of the employment shortfall will likely persist moving forward. Moreover, if employment were to increase due to an increase in labor force participation, it would be accompanied by increases in incomes, and therefore an increase in demand. We believe that labor markets will continue to be very tight unless there is a considerable slowdown in labor demands.” This all suggests that companies need to sharpen their talent acquisition strategies and stay on top of the numbers since the tight labor market is bound to continue for some time.

In the second part of this series, we’ll discuss the “demographic drought” associated with the labor force participation and how it may shrink the available labor pool going forward.

If you would like to receive a copy of Domash’s and Summer’s complete working paper, email us at info@caseyresources.com. Let us help you develop effective talent acquisition tactics.

 

[1] This is equivalent to one minus the prime-age employment-to-population ratio.

[2] As of December 2021, the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) reported a seasonally adjusted

job vacancy rate of 6.8% (a near-record high, and much higher than any vacancy rate before 2021) and a seasonally

adjusted quits rate of 2.9% (the second highest quits rate on record).