Let’s talk about building wellness cultures
by Dr. Moyo Rainos Mutamba
It seems that most of us are having a rough time at work! According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, 70% of employees are concerned about the psychological health and safety of their workplaces, while 14% report that their workplaces are neither healthy nor safe. This is not surprising given the premise of labor and capitalism; one of maximum extraction or output, with little infrastructure or thought for care and well-being.
Given that the workplace is the most significant social context for a lot of us, more so than the home as most people spend the majority of their waking lives in work environments with co-workers, managers, clients, and other stakeholders, it is important to create workplace environments that are emotionally and psychologically safe and contribute positively to workers’ overall mental and emotional wellbeing.
At Bloom, we are constantly grappling with the need for and benefits of moving beyond talking about mental health to nurturing wellness and care cultures for our team. In this article, I share the values, practices, and systems considerations that Bloom has drawn on as tools for action towards building and sustaining wellness and care cultures.
The benefits of wellness cultures in the workplace
Ensuring and sustaining psychological, mental, and emotional thriving requires transcending the growing Let’s Talk About Mental Health culture, towards building and sustaining cultures of wellness. The benefits of cultures of wellness are many. While these depend on context, here are a few that might be universal:
The mental and emotional well-being of people is important PERIOD! It is life-affirming and needed at the individual level, for thrivability, belonging, and overall health.
Since what happens in the workplace forms people in significant ways, the positive effects of cultures of wellness spill over into the larger society.
Mental health is a social justice issue because it is a critical diversity, equity, and inclusion factor. Ultimately, people’s mental health is at the root of initiatives for social justice everywhere.
The health and success of any organization are contingent on the health of the people that constitute it. Simply put, healthy people make for healthy organizations and I would argue that organizational health means success.
Initiating, building, and sustaining cultures of wellness in the workplace is complex, requiring foundational work at the Values, Practices, and Systems levels.
Values
Acknowledgment: Recognizing and acknowledging that your workplace itself adds stress to workers’ lives and therefore can contribute negatively to their mental health is foundational. Earnest acknowledgment entails taking responsibility for creating a wellness and care culture.
Nuance: Mental health tends to be reduced to diagnostic criteria and labels, in the process, limiting our appreciation of the full breadth of wellness. Diverse considerations for mental and emotional thriving include making space for dialogue around neuro-divergence, spirituality, and diverse dependencies (shopping, games, social media, etc, not just substance use).
Whole individual: The recruitment of new workers focuses on their skill sets that contribute to work productivity. Even though that piece is a tiny fraction of a person’s identity it ends up overrepresenting them throughout their work life. Viewing the individual as made of many parts, such as their skillsets, emotional selves, and diverse identities, for example, might support organizations in broadening their assessment of workers’ needs including mental health.
Systems thinking: Mental health is both an individual and systemic phenomenon. It is felt at the individual level and determined by both biological and social factors. It is important to consider how interpersonal relationships, organizational cultures, and larger societal issues such as racism, sexism, colonization, ableism, trans-antagonism among others, influence people’s experiences of the workplace.
Everyone’s responsibility: Given that mental wellness is enabled or diminished by both individual and social factors, the responsibility for achieving a healthy workplace ought to be collective. A collaborative and inclusive approach will always have more impact than the imposition of mental health programs from the top.
Rethinking recovery: Recovery in workplaces is often equated with reaching the same levels of productivity after going through a hard time. This is not the case for many workers. For some, recovery might mean not returning to the same levels of productivity, but rather contributing where they can or being assigned different work altogether or not working at all.
Practices
Supportive teams: A team that is primed, and alert for the wellbeing of its members is an important asset to itself and the company. At Bloom, we have a practice of genuine checking in at all meetings, seeking authentic responses, and offering each other support. Being held with care allows us to feel connected, seen, heard, and supported. This goes a long way in sustaining our individual well-being.
Regular informal and formal learning: Creating opportunities for employees to learn about mental health can go a long way in creating the space people need to acquire knowledge and also explore their own experiences.
Caring and vulnerable management: Openness in workplaces is co-related with the extent to which leaders demonstrate it. When leaders and mentors are vulnerable by sharing their own experiences with mental health issues, this can create space for workers to share openly and potentially seek support.
Infrastructure to support: to acknowledge and support that work in and of itself puts strain on our mental health, infrastructure that makes space to rest and take care of yourself established at the organizational level can be so supportive. This can include shorter work weeks in the summer, week days or periods without meetings, even the invitation to keep your camera off in virtual meetings if your day has been charged, etc.
Bringing in external support: A lot of workplaces are not set up with mental health in mind, and therefore need the guidance and support of subject experts to build capacity inside.
Systems
Mental health department: Every workplace needs to have a team responsible for stewarding a wellness culture. In collaboration with employees and staff, this team will be responsible for caring for the pulse of the wellness culture. Their responsibilities will range from onboarding, regular check-ins, evaluation of wellness culture initiatives and policies among other tasks.
Clear processes to address issues: Issues that exacerbate negative mental and emotional health in the workplace include stigma, mobbing (bullying and psychological harassment), competitiveness among team members, and many more. Clear processes for addressing these risks are critical to cultivating a thriving wellness culture. A Bloom we make use of dialogical processes to address micro-aggressions and inter-personal conflict, creating space for team members to hear each other out and transform their relationship.
Tending to space: The energy of a space tends to be ignored in conversations around mental health. Whether people are working virtually or returning to physical company buildings, care needs to be put in curating the space so that it is inviting and supports people’s mental health. Aesthetic considerations in physical offices or virtual meeting spaces are not mere stylistic additions, but a necessity.
Changing workloads: Claiming that a workplace is a fast-paced environment can be a euphemistic way of staying understaffed. The speed that is expected simply means one person is doing work that ought to be the responsibility of more than them. Workplaces need to consider the productive expectations they have on workers, to find optimums that are supportive of wellness.
Clear and consequential policies: Companies and organizations need to have clear and accessible mental health and safety policies. The policies need to also guarantee that workers will not get fired for being vulnerable about their mental health status and their needs.
At this moment, with a wider range of experiences and both a better understanding of mental health and opportunities for innovation in the workplace in the post-COVID reality, mental, psychological and emotional wellbeing is emerging as a greater priority than ever. The urgency has pushed us at Bloom to be more vigilant in creating a caring work environment and we support other companies and organizations in doing the same. Here are a few practices and offerings we are excited to share with companies and organizations to support you in creating cultures of wellness and care (For full offerings check out our website):
Building safer and brave spaces — creating containers for open, honest, vulnerable dialogue
Team-building — spending time building relationships and increasing trust
Compassionate communication and practices
Leadership coaching — for modeling courage and vulnerability,
Conflict Transformation- conflict mitigation, mediation, and resolution
Building and sustaining employee-centered wellness cultures needless to say calls for workplaces to shift their cultures from an obsession with productivity to caring for workers. That takes unlearning and learning values, instituting practices, and creating systems that align with an ethic of care.