Don’t underestimate what a huge role emotions play in our lives. Your mood impacts your relationships, your work performance and your outlook. Feeling psychologically safe in any environment helps employees to deal with stress in a healthy way and helps to transform negative thoughts into positive ones.
Proactive Leaders prioritise promoting Emotional Wellness because it impacts their employees’:
· Performance levels
· Negotiations efforts
· Conflict resolution
· Leadership capabilities
· Decision making
· Problem solving
· Team work and relationship building
Promoting Emotional Wellness in the workplace ultimately reduces mental health issues, absenteeism, and high staff turnover. Furthermore, it increases the morale and productivity helping the company grow and prosper.
These 5 Simple Ways can Help Proactive Leaders to Improve Emotional Wellness in the Workplace:
1. Prioritise Emotional Wellness on Management Agendas.
Start by prioritising Emotional Wellness strategies on management agendas. Suggest and discuss various ways on how you as proactive leaders plan to promote emotional wellness in the workplace. Set clear goals and constantly report on the progress.
2. Establish Trust
For employees to open up to you as a leader, they need to trust and respect you. Make them feel comfortable around you. Set an example but also show them that you are only human; you also make mistakes which you pay for; and you have emotions as well which might be similar. Build trust among your employees by creating an “Open-door” platform where they can talk about their issues.
3. Promote Emotional Flexibility
Help your employees notice, express and label their emotions. Encourage them to experience their emotions and not to avoid emotions. Avoiding certain emotions might eventually end up in increased stress and anxiety. Help your employees realise that experiencing their emotions is a good thing because it provides a way to determine what is important to us and what is happening in our lives. A tip you can give your employees to practice emotional flexibility is to start keeping a journal. Writing about your emotions is a good way to deal with and process loss, anxiety and stress. When it is on paper, it will be less on your mind.
4. Be Empathetic
Proactive leaders have to show compassion for their employees. Research indicated that empathy enhances employee loyalty and productivity. Empathy is also the key to creating emotional wellness in the workplace. Leaders also have to stay connected with their employees and keep human interaction going, especially in this time where technology is taking over which drastically impacts employees emotional wellbeing.
5. Provide Help and Skills Training
Offer workplace counselling as part of workplace wellness programmes. Create a safe haven where your employees can express themselves and where they can acquire the skills they need to deal with stress, anger, conflict etc. The Mindspa Institute offers a wide variety of in-house or online training courses ideal to assist your employees with the right techniques and tools they need to manage this.
At the end of the day, proactive leaders should realise that their employees are their biggest asset. They should communicate a clear and consistent message to their employees that they care about them and their emotional, physical and mental wellbeing. Ultimately making your employees’ mental and emotional health part of the holistic workplace wellness programme will result in healthier, happy, more engaged, more productive and more loyal employees.