I was organizing my basement office bin. That’s code for the place where I keep all those extra cords in a big plastic bag and an assortment of every office material I’ve slowly retired from desk to drawer. Extra pens. Extra notebooks. A stapler and a staple remover. Then, a pile of these old planners and one from the year where everything changed for all of us – 2020.
As I turned the pages, I felt the panic all over again. In the early weeks of April 2020, I wrote with all this hope it would just be another week. That everything I had planned was just delayed, not done. By November, it’s clear the reality of unprecedented times set in. A lot of “what if” and “I just never imagined…”
What’s unique about this particular unprecedented life experience is that we all did it together. Everyone over the age of 5 lived through these moments. The loneliness. The fear. The toilet paper panic. As all the people changed, work fundamentally changed too for the first time in a very long time. Everything changed – except how we handle mental health at work.
Does Anyone Trust Their Boss Enough To Talk About Mental Health At Work?
The shift to remote work wasn’t the only thing that changed about work in 2020. Our collective mental health was changing too. More people than ever were saying out loud “I’m depressed” and “I’m not OK.” For the first time, it wasn’t one person experiencing a rough patch. It was a society struggling with things that would hurt anyone – job loss, fear, disease, and so much more. All that pain couldn’t just be turned off for work.
Whatever imaginary perception we had of a separation between work and life was gone. There was no coming and going or hiding from the feelings that came up while we lived in our bubbles . But how did that destigmatize mental health at work? Did it change the ways we interact with each other? Do employees trust their manager enough to talk about mental health now?
Short answer? The unfortunate truth is obvious. No. In the last six years, there has been a further disintegration of trust in the workplace regarding conversations about mental health at work. In 2020, 62% of work adults said they could discuss mental health and 31% were OK talking about politics. Today, those numbers have dropped by more than 15%.
(Sources: American Psychiatric Association, Gartner Election 2020, Gartner HR Survey on Politics 2024)
A brutal reality is clear to me here: people don’t even trust their managers to have a conversation without consequences. That’s just not OK for a place where people spend 40+ hours a week. It’s not good for anyone’s mental health and most certainly not going to inspire creativity, inspiration, or the “best work” you describe in those values on the wall.
Building Psychological Safety: How You Can Make IT Safer To Talk About Mental Health At Work
I believe there’s a chance we can change – and should. Managers can’t skip the mental health conversations when you are leading in this current timeline. There’s simply too many unprecedented things happening – and not just politically. It’s not easy to be OK when one more hard thing happens and it’s certainly not going to get better when daily realities are ignored by the team.
But it won’t change because of some policy or presentation at lunch on a Tuesday. It will take a shift in each of us. I think that change starts with our expectations of each other. We have to treat the people around us – whether you’re working or looking for your next role – like human beings. No expectations they will be perfect. No expectations that work is a bigger priority than the rest of their life.
As a Type-A workaholic, that shift has been hard for me. I put work before everything and it has taken a lot of time to adjust. I would be lying if I said I had some perfect formula or plan for you. Personally, here are a few things that I have done in an attempt to shift that tide with my team and show them I am a safe place to talk about their mental health at work.
- Pay attention to what comes up inside of you. I used to panic when things changed at the last minute and that doesn’t help anyone feel safer to tell me what’s going on in their lives. When hard things come up, I have to pay attention to what I feel as much as I pay attention to other people’s feelings. That makes me a safer place for others. I regulate me.
- Take a break. I am allowed to not have the perfect plan instantly. Having real conversations about mental health? Not a race. I’m not going to just figure it all out in 30 minutes in a conference room. I can listen to what’s happening and find solutions later. So can you.
- Go to therapy. I put my appointments on my calendar. Not under some pretend name, but as THERAPY – all caps. We all know it’s not moving and I give the same respect to their appointments. As a collective, we can all encourage the team to use their therapy benefits. Remember, this country is grieving after years of living through collective unprecedented events. All of us need to do things to support mental health.
- Be willing to change. The big reason I believe people don’t talk about hard things at work – especially mental health – is because they don’t think anything will change if they do. If you’re the boss, you need to be willing to make room in your workflow and space for people to bounce back. Sometimes that means you take on more work temporarily. You do a project for someone else. We have to show up for each other to build psychological safety and trust at work.
The healing starts with us. We can all do this – whether you have a manager title or not.