Masawa Minute 29
A workplace revolution | How to improve your work-life balance? | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets on what we’re pondering + where you can get active.
We’ve entered February, and while the end of winter is already in sight, we can’t say the same about working from home. While providing some great benefits, remote work doesn’t come without its challenges, which add to the already difficult task of building healthy and resilient organizations. And that’s what the newsletter is about — the workplace transformation, individual and organizational wellbeing, culture of openness, and vulnerability. Enjoy!
Attend
Mental Health and Human Rights
Here’s another great webinar from Mental Health for All series run by United for Global Mental Health, The Lancet Psychiatry, Mental Health Innovation Network, and MHPSS.net. These bi-weekly series are designed for the mental health community with the latest evidence on pressing global issues and provide practical solutions.
Mental health and human rights is among the topics that need to be urgently addressed by policy makers, investors, organization leaders, and other change leaders in the mental health space. Due to the global focus of the webinar, it’s relevant to anyone regardless of their location. Don’t miss it!
Healthy Eating, Keto, and Mental Health
In this webinar, Dr. Chris Palmer, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education at McLean Hospital, will talk about the relationship between mental health and a healthy diet.
Dr. Palmer will share his thoughts on the connection between the two, the effects of keto and other diets, and healthy eating habits. He’ll also discuss how to live with and maintain certain mental health conditions, explain some myths surrounding mental health and nutrition and answer all the questions you might have about the subject.
What we’re reading…
🗃 Workplace revolution is coming — will we get it right?
Research shows that workplace stressors like long hours, economic insecurity, and work-family conflict cost the US about $180 billion and 120,000 deaths per year. And that’s not all — COVID-19 could result in a 50% increase in the prevalence of behavioral health conditions which could lead to between $100 billion and $140 billion of added costs in the first 12 months of the pandemic. In light of these figures, McKinsey & Companypublished an article taking a look at the cost of mental disorders to countries as well as individual companies and adding to the already strong business case for providing better mental health support in the workplace.
Stress and depression increase not only the costs directly associated with behavioral health problems but also the costs of other physical illnesses stemming from them. More and more workplaces are starting to take the demand for mental health support tools into account. Yet even when employers consider mental health a priority, many are unable to meet increasing demands — a survey conducted by Ginger reported that 81% of people who haven’t used their behavioral health benefits encountered a variety of barriers to access it and one-third of respondents paid for the services out of pocket as because their benefits didn’t cover it. This suggests a big market opportunity for evidence-backed accessible workplace wellness tools.
Good mental health benefits pay off — according to the World Economic Forum, $4 is returned to the economy for every $1 invested in mental health support. However, companies have to make sure that the mental health benefits provided actually serve it and its most important asset — people. Read the full article to get more insight into the problem, the cost, and how to address it effectively. We found it quite inspiring, and hopefully you will too.
Mental health in the workplace: The coming revolution
📌 Why we care about organizational health
We talk about organizational health a lot and for good reasons — now we decided to get into them in detail. Here’s an article that explains how we think about organizational health, why we consider it to be so important and why it matters for what we do.
Our nurture capital approach treats organizational health as a priority. This is the case not only because we care about the founders we partner with but also because it’s a crucial internal enabler of business results and external impact. If the individuals within an organization aren’t thriving, the organization is far more likely to fail. Healthy organizations also perform significantly better and see higher productivity and profits, and lower turnover.
We place people — founders, organizations, and their wellbeing — at the center of our approach. The assistance we offer is designed with founders and teams rather than for them because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to nurturing founder strength and organizational resilience. If you’d like to learn more about our organizational health framework, read the article and be sure to expect more posts about the subject in the future. We’re excited to share it with you!
Healthy organizations drive transformative change
🧷 The connection between individual and organization
What does a toxic work culture look like? If a lack of trust and transparency, abusive power dynamics, discrimination, or unrealistic workload sound familiar, your organization should immediately address its negative working culture and start building a culture of wellbeing. But where to start?
The importance of individual wellbeing shouldn’t be overlooked as it affects burnout, resiliency, trust, and open-mindedness. Improving levels of personal wellbeing also affects openness and collaboration on a company-wide level. However, the problem can’t be solved by addressing only this part of the wellbeing equation — changes need to happen on the organizational and societal scale as well. To better address this in the social sector, The Wellbeing Project and other organizations created a three-year Organizational Exploratory Program (OEP) that focuses on organizations’ human-centered aspects, like belonging, cooperation, and resilience.
Even though the research accompanying the program isn’t over yet, some insights have already emerged. Small, incremental shifts in policies and procedures can result in a significant change in organizational wellbeing, as long as the initiatives match the team’s unique cultural and political contexts. Moving away from traditional values towards structures that encourage accountability and cultivate a sense of belonging also fosters wellbeing and helps integrate it into the company’s mission.
Integrating Individual and Organizational Well-Being
🖌 How to fight stigma at work
More and more people choose to talk about their mental health problems at work, yet stigma remains, slowing a possible workplace transformation. How can we reduce mental health stigma at work?
Mental and physical health shouldn’t be treated differently. Taking a day off to recover mentally should be as normal as taking a day off when you’re coming down with a cold. False excuses should be avoided — if people aren’t entirely comfortable talking about their specific experiences, renaming “sick days” to “recovery days” could help normalize taking some time for oneself. Talking about challenges shouldn’t be left solely to employees — if they’re comfortable doing so, the company’s leaders should also share their experiences.
It’s also important to understand that while the two are connected, stress and mental health challenges aren’t the same. It’s essential not to use “stress” as a euphemism for mental health problems and confuse the strategies meant to address these areas. In addition, it should be very clear what potential accommodations employees can expect when it comes to mental health support offered by the company. Once these seemingly simple things become the norm, we can expect mental health stigma to decrease. Until then, we have a lot of work to do.
4 Ways To Destigmatize Mental Health At Work
🧮 Putting life in work-life balance
It’s evident that working long hours is detrimental to both physical and mental health, yet many professionals still struggle to overcome their biases and deeply ingrained habits. How can we get rid of these perceptions and reach a more sustainable, healthier work-life balance?
Harvard Business Review conducted almost 200 in-depth interviews to explore this question. The majority of the interviewees described their jobs as highly intense, demanding, and chaotic, and many seemed to agree that these long exhausting hours are a crucial part of their professional success. Some of the people, however, consciously resisted this structure and shared numerous strategies they had utilized to improve their professional life.
They all had something in common — a mental process of reflection to question assumptions and define their role more intentionally. This process manifested itself in a five-step cycle, consisting of pausing and denormalizing the work hours, being mindful of one’s emotions, reprioritizing, considering the alternatives, and implementing the changes. The key thing to understand is that it was never a one-time activity but rather a continuous re-evaluation of the assumptions. It’s easy to fall back on “business as usual”, however, it’s detrimental to a real change towards a healthier, more satisfying work life.
Work-Life Balance Is a Cycle, Not an Achievement
✨ Masawa Thoughts
Org health is heating up the airwaves, finally. The Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health (say that five times fast!) launched at Davos last week with big founding companies like HSBC, Unilever, and Salesforce.
This initiative joins a number of important endeavors focused on workplace mental health like One Mind at Work. Yes, it makes intuitive and research sense that a healthy workforce creates more value, that leaders and employees who feel a sense of belonging, purpose, coherence, agency, recognition, learning, and growth simply do and are better. But it is a herculean task to set up the correct systems that foster an enabling organizational health. This is one of the reasons Masawa places such emphasis on nurturing capital, focusing on org health and its connections to social impact and financial returns. At the end of the day, it’s all about the humans.
💭 In Closing
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Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
