The statistics show that, on any given day, more than 20% of Americans come to work with a diagnosed mental illness, a figure likely also seen in many other countries. So, what can leaders do to help combat what seems to be an epidemic of work-related stress? Columbia Business School Professor Rita McGrath, a best-selling author and leading expert on strategy and innovation, says leaders can do five things to make work better for our mental health.
Revenues went up 33% when people were working fewer hours. Itâs not rocket science â healthier, happier, more engaged employees are more productive.
Drawing on the recent book Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them by President of Southern New Hampshire University Paul LeBlanc, the first injunction is to keep humans at critical touch points at every stage when you try to scale any system. âItâs easy to make mental health a central concern when thereâs just a few of you,â McGrath says, âBut once you scale up to several hundred or a thousand people and more, you risk losing the human dimension. Thatâs because scaled systems hate humanity â they love precision and replication and abhor essentially human qualities such as messiness and imperfection.â So, standardize everything you can, but use humans for everything else. That way, when issues arise, they are dealt with humanely.
McGrathâs second piece of strategic advice, which stems from the work of entrepreneur and author Keith Ferrazzi and others, is to be very intentional about building team processes to make teams cohere better. Whether team members are remote or physically together, make sure to talk to them on a personal basis regularly. âFor example, once a month, stop everything, take an hour, and just go around your team, and you ask, âHow are you? Whatâs going on with you?â Put the schedule on hold for a moment and take a breath together. Being intentional and taking control this way can help a team cohere much more effectively.â
âWe are all very motivated when we feel we have ownership of something or ownership over what we do. We feel pride when we sense that we are aligned around something thatâs shared and importantâ- Professor Rita McGrath
The next item on the agenda is to give people a sense of ownership over what they do. âWe are all very motivated when we feel we have ownership of something or ownership over what we do. We feel pride when we sense that we are aligned around something thatâs shared and important,â McGrath argues. She cites the example of Pete Stavros, who pioneered an innovativeâŻemployee engagement and ownership model at private equity firm KKR. The approach has been successfully implemented at several companies and has positively impacted tens of thousands of employees. Stavrosâ KKR colleague Nate Taylor said of the approach: âWe have seen firsthand the benefits of this model. Investing in the workforce by introducing broad-based ownership and engagement programs is good for employees and businesses. If applied at a larger scale, programs that seek to align the interests of all employees can lead to greater financial inclusion, worker satisfaction, and financial returns for all stakeholders.”
For her next piece of leadership advice, McGrath draws on Zeynep Tonâs concept of good jobs. Essentially, this means organizations should stop thinking about human beings as centers of cost but rather as centers of growth. She urges, âThink about what makes a good job system â living wages, stable schedules, and strong hiring, training, and performance management â and follow Zeynep Tonâs four principles in creating good jobs: focus and simplify, standardize and empower, cross-train and â arguably most important of all for mental health â operate with slack, so people arenât strung so tightly that they might snap at any moment and have time for learning. If you create good jobs in this way, it can drive your top line.â
To break this natural tendency, we need to put structural mechanisms in place.
As McGrath points out, we all know what causes people to be burned out â too much work, no control over what we do, toxic bosses, lack of due recognition and rewards, no match with our values, and so on â and we know how to create mentally safe workplaces that are good to work in, but for some reason, we donât get it nearly as much as we should. To break this natural tendency, we need to put structural mechanisms in place. We tend to flock to people we already know and empower people who are like us â by recruiting in our own image, for example, which, of course, leads to bias. To break this phenomenon, we need processes that systematically combat bias, such as using algorithms to help in decisions around recruitment and promotion rather than personal choice â something that is increasingly easy to do, given the ready availability of comparatively cheap tools.
As the globally recognized pioneer of the four-day week movement, innovator, entrepreneur, and philanthropistâŻAndrew BarnesâŻhas made a career of market-changing innovation and industry digitization. However, the idea behind the four-day week came not from the disinterested pursuit of work-life balance, but from the attempt âto work out how I could make my company more productive.â Through a very simple experiment â offering his employees the choice to deliver the same output in four days rather than five â he found that employee engagement scores went up 40%, stress levels plummeted, sick days halved, and more people said they were able to do their job better working four days rather than five and the experiment soon morphed into the four-day week movement.
Proof of this increased productivity comes from pilot programs for SMEs in the US and the UK, which showed that revenues went up 33% over a period when people were working fewer hours. âItâs not rocket science â healthier, happier, more engaged employees are more productive,â says Barnes.
Key to the strategy is that it is a gift offered to employees and not a matter of right, so there is a mutual responsibility between the organization and the employee: âIâm treating my employees as adults,â Andrew Barnes adds. âThey are responsible for rethinking how they do their job because they know their job better than you do. And they know the things that are stopping them from being productive. Equally, they know what stops their colleagues from being productive. This works because itâs not just an individual goal; itâs a team goal. Itâs got to be a mutual win-win. The real issue here is about rethinking what leadership is. It isnât about dictating how people do things â itâs about empowering them to think for themselves. The biggest question is not whether to do a four-day week or not â itâs whether your biggest competitor does it first.”
The biggest impediment to such a change is the leadership team. Barnes believes they must rethink how they approach things. âThe only people for whom I made it compulsory to work a four-day week was my leadership team â they had to walk the talk. Youâve got to change the culture to reflect what everybody wants in the organization.â
Decades of research show that when people are treated unfairly or when they experience discrimination, it has a huge impact on stress disorders such as anxiety and depression, but the kind of help that people get when it comes to addressing such concerns varies.
Poornima Luthra, Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School and author of The Art of Active Allyship: 7 Behaviours to Empower You to Push The Pendulum Towards Inclusion At Work and co-author ofâŻLeading Through Bias, cautions that, to make work better for everyoneâs mental health, itâs important to keep in mind who âeveryoneâ is: âWork isnât experienced in the same way by people who come from marginalized communities and groups, and this is across a range of intersectional identities â gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, age, race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background and so on.â
Decades of research show that when people are treated unfairly or when they experience discrimination, it has a huge impact on stress disorders such as anxiety and depression, but the kind of help that people get when it comes to addressing such concerns varies. Marginalized ethnic communities and the LGBTQ+ community, for example, donât get the kind of support that âmainstreamâ groups do.
To tackle this inequity and discrimination, Luthra says we need to create fair spaces where everyone can show up as themselves and not mask a part of their identity to fit in with the dominant norms. They also need to feel a sense of belonging because that reduces stress and anxiety.
To ensure our organizations are truly inclusive, Luthra argues, we need to âget down to the core of both the system side of it and the cultural side of itâ and look at system structures because bias is embedded across the entire employee lifecycle in hiring practices.
She points out that there are âvery practical things that can be done to make sure that weâre creating spaces where we can show up as ourselves.â These include flexible working options, parental leave, gender-neutral bathrooms, quiet spaces, and booths where people can work in a space where theyâre comfortable and donât have sensory overload. âThings like that create spaces where intersectional identities feel like they donât need to cover up, and that reduces the stress that people are experiencing. We need to pay a lot more attention to what kind of workplace environments we create so that weâre able to make sure that, for example, neuro-divergent individuals can thrive. We often think about these things as benefitting people from marginalized groups, but they benefit all of us.â
Instead, try to understand how someone might experience the same environment in a way that causes them stress but doesnât cause you stress.
Luthra uses the concept of active allyship to create spaces where work is not better only for the mental health of certain people or groups, but where âeverybody gets to thrive, and everybody gets to have an environment where their mental health is protected.â
The Art of Active Allyship identifies seven behaviors conducive to better mental health in the workplace, including empathetic engagement. âWeâve created an environment around us where thereâs so much toxicity associated with creating these inclusive spaces that weâre all very scared,â Luthra says, âBut what it takes is very simple. Empathy is so important.”
“The next time you hear someone at work saying something that could be harmful to an individual or community, take them aside and ask, âTell me where youâre coming from.â And listen without needing to respond. Instead, try to understand how someone might experience the same environment in a way that causes them stress but doesnât cause you stress. There are ways in which we can have those rich conversations, and it brings teams closer together. It makes us appreciate our environment, and it helps us nurture a better space for each other. A lot of research shows that inclusive organizations are more resilient, and theyâre resilient because inclusive cultures mean that we are creating psychologically safe environments.â
This article was developed in collaboration with Thinkers50 from theirâŻMind MattersâŻseries of conversations between leading experts in the field of mental well-being at work.
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