The topics of mental health, wellbeing, and work-life stressors are not new, but in our new world of work – with the rise of hybrid and remote workplaces – they take on a whole new meaning.
Employees put great trust in their organisations and managers to guide them through both the good times, and the bad. To support employees with mental health, it’s key to stay connected to how your team is feeling – in order to prevent mental health concerns before they develop.
However, this task isn’t as easy as it sounds. Without the right software to support you, reaching everyone on a regular basis becomes a mammoth task. Having one-to-one conversations is great for supporting employees already facing mental health concerns, but there are only so many one-to-ones your HR team can handle, and how do you know who needs the support to prevent their mental health from suffering?
In answer to this challenge, companies of all sizes are turning to pulse survey technology. Providers like Stribe allow you to scale up the number of conversations you’re having with your employees – giving your employees an opportunity to tell you how they’re feeling, at a low time and cost for your organisation.
This makes it easier to get a clear picture of your employees’ mental health over time, individually and as a total workforce.
“In a recent survey of HR leaders 95% said digital mental health tools would be important in 2022. And 47% are planning to launch them this year.”
Before using pulse surveys, it’s essential that you think of employee mental health more from a proactive perspective than a reactive one. Reactive treatment for mental health in the workplace has its place (as it’s not always possible to prevent 100% of the causes of mental health) but proactive care can work wonders for the wellbeing of your team.
A good start to preparing your employees for questions about their mental health is to make it seem less like a problem people experience, and that it’s just part of everyday life. Normalising this topic in meetings, one-to-ones, and internal communications, will increase psychological safety in your workplace.
Once you have this feeling of safety surrounding mental health, it’s time to collect regular feedback from your employees. But what are the best practices to get the most out of your surveys, and what are the best questions to ask to prevent mental health concerns from developing?
As thought leaders on this topic, we’re here to give you a helping hand.
Privacy:
Stribe is fully anonymous, and only the employee will ever be able to reveal their own identity. This allows your employees to speak freely, and for you to get honest information on their mental health & wellbeing.
Length:
Pulse surveys, in their nature, are meant to be simple. Make your questions short and sweet. The less effort you need from employees to respond, the better your response rate.
Frequency:
When pulse surveys are sent out frequently it allows you to track the trends that matter to you over time, so you can track your progress of how well you are supporting your employees’ mental health.
Follow-up comments:
We recommend you include a text-based follow-up after each pulse question, such as “why did you score this way?”, this will allow your employees to give detailed feedback and for you to have more information to work with.
Make your surveys accessible:
To get a complete picture of the mental health of your team, it’s important you can get as many responses as possible. In order to achieve this, your pulse surveys must be easily accessible and answerable. For instance, with Stribe your employees can answer straight from their inbox, via an iOS app, an Android app, or by an offline QR code.
Pulse surveys are great, but you may be wondering what questions you should ask your employees… To be proactive about your team’s mental health, here are a few areas to consider starting with!
Resources:
Finding out how popular, accessible and supportive your mental health resources are is essential to improving them and better supporting your team
Some of the best questions to ask to increase your understanding:
Work-life balance:
Not only does a healthy work-life balance improve your employees’ mental health, but it benefits your business too. Employees with a good work-life balance are more efficient, productive and creative.
Some of the best questions to ask to increase your understanding:
Tackle stress with initiatives:
What’s the ‘Cognitive hygiene’ like at your organisation? This is the ability to manage negative thinking – which contributes considerably to mental health issues. To improve this, organisations can offer support with mindfulness, meditation and keeping a good work/life balance. Some businesses have designated quiet areas of the workplace designed with the aim of enabling their employees to relax and take a mental break.
Some of the best questions to ask to increase your understanding:
Create a tailored solution
How tailored is your mental health support? Everyone has different mental health needs, some people need flexible work during tough periods, and some may even need time off to fully recover. It’s important to get a complete picture of your organisation and what support is needed in challenging times.
Some of the best questions to ask to increase your understanding:
Manager support
As much as your organisation should focus on protecting mental health, your managers should live and breathe this too. To be truly effective managers should have the training to develop positive relationships at work and spot mental health concerns either in the office or remotely, where possible.
This may also include developing the ability to have sensitive conversations about mental health in the right way. (For more about this, check out our Little Book of Big Conversations: the essential guide to creating a great speak-up culture)
Some of the best questions to ask to increase your understanding:
Extra resources:
If you’d like a platform that takes all the legwork out of surveying your employees, we’re here to help.
Stribe’s highly customisable pulse surveys make it easy for organisations to check in on their employees, especially for those who are the hardest to reach. This makes it easy to gather
both instant and frequent insights to better understand your team.
Our people science team are always on hand too, helping you to create, plan and launch successful surveys – as well as maximising the rest of the tools within the platform.
Stribe connects people, helping them feel happier, safer, and heard in their daily work life. Simple.
If you’d like to learn more, you can get in touch here 😃
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