Time to Recharge: Rubin Fortunato Celebrates Mental Health Awareness Month – Week #1
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May 3, 2024
Employers, if you’ve ever wondered whether benefits exist to prioritizing your employees’ mental health, the answer is YES. Why? Well, your employees spend the majority of their waking hours on the job, and chances are that work is the most structured and controlled environment in their lives. Work is a primary place of social and emotional support. Work can improve mental health by providing steady income, routine, positive relationships, and a sense of purpose and achievement. But, at the same time, work also can undermine mental health. High demands, toxicity, and lack of opportunity are some of the reasons why being on the job may leave workers emotionally exhausted and unmotivated.
Good mental health is good for your employees … and your bottom line, too. The World Health Organization reports that 12 billion workdays are lost each year due to anxiety and depression alone, at a cost of $1 trillion in lost productivity. See Mental health at work: policy brief, available here.
This month – in a series of posts – we’ll share some practical tips on protecting and promoting good mental health in the workplace, along with specific examples of how we’re trying to put our own advice into practice.
Tip #1: Listen to your employees. Be sensitive to your employees’ concerns, even if you can’t solve all of them. We hope that every employee of the Firm feels free to raise issues directly with our Management Committee, or any member of the Committee, but there is always room to improve communication, efficiency, productivity, and morale at the Firm. So, just last month, we created an Office Liaison position to serve as another channel for employees to be heard. This new position has already led to a process improvement and plans for an off-site team-building event next month. (Spoiler alert: dust off your bowling gear!)
Tip #2: Share with each other and give back to the community. Doing the right thing has a correlation to good mental health. It promotes a sense of belonging. For our first mental health activity this month, we asked each employee to bring in a good book for a “library” in the lunchroom. We’ve invited employees to take a book to read at lunch or on a break, or to read at home or when they travel. Employees can log feedback and share thoughts on what they’ve read on a database created on our Firm’s intranet. At the end of this activity, we will donate the books to a local charity or library.
Tip #3: Get creative. Creativity can be healing, so try to give employees a creative outlet. To complement our “library,” we provided white and craft paper card stock, colored tassels, and markers so that our employees could create bookmarks for themselves, a coworker, or a loved one.
Tip #4: Laugh. Laughter comes with many benefits, including improving one’s mental and physical health. Today (ok, yes, a day early), we wished our employees, “May the 4th be with you.” We offered Star Wars-inspired PEZ dispensers to each employee and their school-aged (or younger) children. What’s better for your mental health than a tablet of sugar shot out of the neck of your favorite Star Wars character?
Stay tuned for some more tips next week.
