Mental health biggest concern for HR leaders

Post-pandemic, mental health has become the biggest concern for HR leaders as Covid highlighted the importance of people.

HR leaders from Accenture, Wellbeing at Work, and Humanify HR shared their top learnings and challenges, and mental health is at the top of the list.

Prior to the pandemic for business leaders, Sarah Queenan, founder and managing director at Humanify HR Consulting said.

“The risk was that people had almost become a little bit of a commodity in some respects, it was this mindset that they're always going to be there. The pandemic brought into the forefront of business owners, leaders, managers minds that people really are an organisation's most important asset,” she said.

“A lot of people were thinking about their mortality when COVID first started. People were genuinely questioning whether or not they were going to survive it. It’s been very interesting in the sense that it accelerated the focus on people and wellbeing.”

Over the past three years, the focus on the health, wellbeing and safety of employees has become the number one priority.

Sarah Kruger, chief human resources officer (CHRO) at Accenture said, “Safety to some degree used to be pretty black and white, as it was directed more at your heavy technology or your machinery dominated and rural sectors,” she said.

“It was all about the physical, but now health and safety are focused more on the mental. And it's harder to see, harder to measure, and harder to support.”

Kruger said its easy to change the physical dangers in a workplace like an electrical cord, but it is “not as easy” to set up the work environment in a mentally well way – in part because different people cope in and are impacted in different ways.

Lawrence Mitchell, APAC CEO at Wellbeing at Work World Group said work should enhance your employees' wellbeing rather than detract from it.

“We're at this interesting point in time where leading companies are going beyond the peripheral, and looking at core issues like job design – asking if people are resourced to do the job or skilled to do the job,” he said.

“Whilst giving people access to meditation and yoga classes is very beneficial, but doesn’t get to the core problem – because if your employees are feeling that they can't cope with the workload, or they’re doing a job that needs another two people, having access to wellness content could make things worse by adding to the overwhelm."

Mitchell said investing in people leads to revenues and margins, "Particularly if you shift the focus to a longer time-line which presents a very different picture.”

Looking after your employees health and wellbeing

HR leaders and HR practitioners and business owners more broadly need to be looking at energy as the new economy, Queenan said.  

She said HR leaders should look at ways they can support employees to maintain that energy to prevent burnout.

“There is a global epidemic of burnout. People are quite fatigued, coming out of the COVID experience,” she said.

“So that energy piece is going to be really important – whether it's looking at new ways of working, or more broadly about flexibility that works for individuals, which really see the focus this year on personalising the employee experience. “

She added, “People now have an expectation when they're coming into the workplace, that they're going to have a personalised experience, and that their employer is going to be able to adapt HR policies to suit their individual circumstances – it can no longer just be a one size fits all approach to managing HR.”