You Might Be Making Your Anxious Staff Miserable

But you don’t have to be.

I would like to discuss something with you, please schedule a meeting with me.

To some people, that message might go unnoticed. Could be anything, right? It doesn’t say anything explicitly negative, so it probably isn’t worth worrying about.

But for those of us with mild to moderate anxiety, this is the most stressful email, Slack or Skype message that we can receive from a boss or superior. With no details and no context, it could be about anything.

And for people with anxiety, “anything” means “something bad.”

A single message like this shoots us down an angst-ridden rabbit hole. What did I do wrong? Am I getting fired? Did the thing I said at the meeting last week not go over well? Where should I start looking for work?

And so the hand-wringing, the nail-biting, and the tossing and turning at night begin. Every moment in recent memory is replayed and dissected. Our brains play out the worst of the worst scenarios on a nightmarish loop that disrupts our life at work, home and everywhere in between.

Those from older generations may be ready to break out the world’s smallest violin for another overly-sensitive Millennial who finds time to whine about being “triggered” in between Instagramming their avocado toast and playing Fortnite.

And if you feel that way, more power to you. But before you brush it off as ridiculous, you should note: this isn’t just a Millennial problem.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older, or 18.1% of the population every year.”

The data says it all: there is a good chance a significant number of your staff deal with anxiety on a daily basis, and you may be contributing to an already difficult battle by sending ominous messages that, frankly, freak people with anxiety out.

And with mental health becoming more of a focus in working environments and society as a whole, forward-thinking managers and business leaders should be on the lookout for ways to help improve the mental health of their staff.

Thankfully, for those concerned about the mental health of their staff, there is a simple solution:

If you want to minimize the amount of anxiety you instill your staff, simply make sure to provide just a little context about why you are scheduling a meeting or what you plan on discussing.

Even when asking for a less-than-positive meeting, adding some context can help mitigate the amount of anxiety it causes. For example, you might say:

I would like to speak with you regarding the numbers from last week which were a bit lower than expected.

As your staff, is that a meeting I am looking forward to having? Probably not.

But at least some of the unknown is removed. I likely already knew the numbers weren’t great and I hopefully know why, so I can come prepared to discuss the issue. It may not remove all of my anxiety, but the black-cloud of uncertainty is at least mitigated.

Contextualizing meeting requests is just one small example of something managers can do to help promote mental health in the workplace, but it speaks to a larger point: as managers, we need to remember that we have a big impact on the lives of our staff, for better or worse. And what may seem like a small thing to us (because we know our own intentions or aren’t ourselves anxious people) can have a major impact on the lives of the people we work with.

Taking that extra moment to add a little context to a message is a small thing for a manager, but for some, it can be the difference between a normal week and one needlessly spent fretting over the future of their career.

And given the opportunity to make a small number of people’s lives a bit better, that extra moment is definitely worth it.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 339,876+ people.

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