By 2030, mental health problems will be the leading cause of mortality worldwide. According to the Mental Health Atlas of the World Health Organization, governments are the first to be cited as responsible, and above all financiers, for mental health services. In recent years, however, companies have also realized their role, as most people spend a third of their adult life at work. Workplaces that promote mental health and support people with mental disorders are more likely to reduce absenteeism and increase productivity. As the WHO has estimated, for every dollar invested in treating mental disorders, there is a $ 4 return in improved health and productivity. Many mental health risk factors can also be present in the workplace, which is why an effective strategy to prevent them is important.
The psychological well-being of workers came even more under the magnifying glass during the pandemic. As explained by a Huffpost Biancamaria Cavallini, Occupational Psychologist and Customer Success Manager of Mindwork, the first Italian psychological consultancy company specialized in the business field, “the duration of the health emergency is putting a strain on people and also those who, in an initial phase, reacted by putting in the field of its resources, it finds itself today increasingly exhausted ”.
Stress, burnout and anxiety are the main risks to the well-being of workers
The 2021 Global Wellbeing Survey, designed and conducted by Aon in collaboration with Ipsos, analyzed how employers are addressing employee wellbeing and what impact a wellbeing program can have on company performance. .
The survey looked at more than 1,000 companies in 41 countries, including Italy. The main results show that 82% of the companies interviewed consider the well-being of their employees as a priority but only 55% of them have a strategy in this regard in their corporate culture.
In Italy, for Mindwork, BVA Doxa conducted a research on the well-being of workers, interviewing 301 people (managers, middle managers, employees) in September 2021, from which it emerges that 85% of people consider their general psychological well-being correlated. to that at work and vice versa. Cavallini also points out that “80% of the interviewees and interviewees have experienced at least one symptom related to Burnout, which means a feeling of exhaustion, a decrease in working efficiency, an increase in mental detachment and cynicism with respect to work”.
According to the Ipsos survey, in fact, stress, burnout and anxiety are the main risks for the well-being of employees that affect company performance. An alarming fact is that in all countries the balance between work and private life is at the first place in the problems faced by workers, followed up to fourth position by others that always concern psychological well-being. Only then do problems related to economic issues arrive. And BVA Doxa confirms: for more than half (51%) of male and female workers, responsibilities and work commitments interfere with private life and perceive the difficulty in defining clear boundaries between life and work.
When it comes to stress, Cavallini explains, “we must consider the balance between the demands of the environment around us and the resources we have, there must not be an imbalance”. In the technical field, he adds, “a distinction is made between ‘eustress’ and ‘distress’, where the former is a positive stress while the latter is a negative stress that exhausts resources”. In fact, up to a certain point, the expert continues, “stress is positive because it motivates us and pushes us to do better, like anxiety that often helps us and can also be a thermometer of how much we care about one thing. What is fundamental is not to transform eustress into distress ”.
We need the culture of well-being in the workplace, in Italy it is lacking above all at the top
At the presentation of BVA Doxa’s research, during the Mindwork “Head On” event, the scientific director of the group Luca Mazzucchelli intervened, reflecting on how the numbers that photograph the situation of psychological well-being in the workplace are important indicators of beginning of a new era. “At the beginning it was physical work that generated value, then the type of rewarding work changed, when the era of the mind arrived. Here it was the ability to have brilliant ideas, to know how to organize numbers, ideas and people and turn them into concrete results that made the difference, ”he said. However, it happens that evolution is continuing: “Today it is not the physical or mental effort that creates value, but the emotional one. As a person, partner, leader, manager or company, we must put the heart at the center of our growth strategy (personal and professional), with all that this represents: values, empathy and the ability to listen first of all “.
As Biancamaria Cavallini points out, this translates into a positive chain: “When people are well, they work better and companies grow” – he says – “by now the numbers and literature tell us, there is a close link between psychological well-being and productivity “.
Despite this, “a culture of feeling good at work is still lacking, even though it is the activity we dedicate most of our time to”. And from the BVA Doxa survey it emerges that the share of people who claim to suffer from frequent problems of anxiety and insomnia for work-related reasons is close to 50%.
“It should be taken for granted to feel good at work but often this is not the case because this culture is lacking above all at the top”, says the psychologist. “The stigma linked to psychological health does not help, the manager who asks how you are is something unthinkable, indeed it seems that he should not care and that certain experiences considered private should not arrive in the workplace”. But as Cavallini explains, “we are people, when we enter the company we wear our professional identity but we always remain with our fears and concerns”.
What is missing is the human component of work, “which is not only objectives and performance, but also a relationship and attention to the psychological needs of the person and it is above all at the level of leadership that must be clear”. Something is moving, “many companies we work with are training their managers in the direction of the psychological well-being of their collaborators”.
Young people are very attentive to psychological well-being and are those who risk the most
Having a strategy focused on the well-being of workers, Cavallini assures, is very important in attracting new talents as well as productivity. “The new generations are much more attentive to psychological well-being than in the past”.
According to the data that emerged from the BVA Doxa survey, workers and young women workers have a greater propensity to leave their jobs because of an emotional malaise. 49% of the under 34s, in fact, have resigned at least once to preserve their psychological health. Furthermore, when looking for a new job position, 73% of people say they prefer a company that is attentive to psychological well-being, even when the level of perceived stress at the time of the interview is low.
As reported by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), among the factors that expose young people to greater health risks in the workplace are: not knowing their rights or the obligations of their employers work, not having the courage to talk to someone, the lack of recognition by employers of the additional protection that must be guaranteed to young workers.
“Often people leave their boss and not the company,” says Cavallini. This appears to be even more true in the youth population. As he told a Huffpost Mario, 27 and a job in the legal sector in a private company, young people “in addition to the anxiety of having to fight with a high rate of youth unemployment – the average rate in July 2021 was 28.7%, ed – they have to cope with work environments in which the boss exercises his authority not for a process of empowerment of resources or of the group but in a way that sometimes demeans the work of others “.
Cavallini urges young people in their first professional roles to have a little courage and to speak up if they feel uncomfortable. “In this the HR function can and must be of help, also as a manager of dynamics between colleagues and superiors”. The problem for Cavallini is that we are not used to talking about the relationship at work. “We talk about the task to be done, about the problems in achieving the objectives, but we rarely discuss how we find ourselves working together”, he concludes.
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