An Overlooked Tool to Help Manage Mental Well Being

— We want our employees to bring their best selves to work every day. That's why mental well-being has been a hot topic since the pandemic. — And we're going to show you in this episode of the three point that there's a tool you likely already have in place that can help you spot burnout and manage well-being better. No need for suspense. Let's hear it from our expert, Hannah Yardley of Achievers. We often have tools like time tracking that we utilize to understand productivity, a hot word in today's organizations. But what if we reframe that lens when we saw productivity was down and actually questioned why beyond performance and used that data that a lot of organizations have to actually question whether maybe there's burnout or some kind of mental health issue that might be going on that's contributing to that. — You see what she's saying? We tend to see a performance issue as that alone. So, we think Trey isn't keeping up or Shanice is falling behind. But these days, there's a good chance that Trey and Shanice face underlying issues, perhaps some stress on their mental well-being. — So, who can help best? The first place that I would go to is our middle managers level. — And we talk about them being super critical so often, but they really are the face of that day-to-day interactions with our employees. So, frontline managers are the linchpin. They're keeping their eyes on the performance metrics and the realities behind the numbers. And that's when they want to take this approach. Yeah, that's part of why I think the middle manager role is so important is that they know how best that person is going to react. They know that person the best. They know what is motivating to them. They know when behaviors look different — and they know what might be the tactics that they've used in the past or that or to go down that path to be able to unlock what it needs. I think this is very personalized in terms of being able to be able to tackle it. — Now, back to the beginning. To help your employees manage their mental well-being, you'll want to be resourceful. Use what you already have. The tools you use to measure productivity can signal stress and other mental well-being issues. Prepare middle managers. Ensure they're ready to not only coach employees on how to improve performance, but how to address stress. Support middle managers. Remember, they're employees, too, and they likely face extra stress dealing with all of this. We think this resource can help you with that. Coaching skills for managers and supervisors. It's part of the premium content on HR Morning. You can download it from our site. Thanks for joining me on this episode.