The Changes Employers Must Make If They Want To Survive & Thrive
First, let’s start with the essential: Does your company deserve to survive? Is your business really bringing a valuable solution to the world’s problems or is adding to them?
Because a company whose workforce has to rely on psychiatric drugs – who pollute our drinking water, our food source, and wreaks havoc in the entire ecosystem – to not even make ends meets, is an existential threat to humanity itself, not a solution.
For more on this topic, see the warnings research on Environmental pollution with psychiatric drugs.
Second, let’s talk about diagnosis. The three main causes of employees work related mental health conditions are:
- Poor pay and poor work conditions
- Unrealistic demands for performance with little to no training
- Incompetent or toxic leadership (often both) leading to a toxic work environment
It’s a waste of time and money leading only to more loses if instead of addressing the cause at its root you keep addressing the symptoms. I.e., the effect these factors have on your employees’ mental health and performance.
The question employers should be asking in 2024 is not ‘what mental health support can we offer employees to improve their productivity’, but ‘what do we really stand for? How badly do we want to survive the wave of change upon us, and what personal development programs we ask our management to undertake to ensure they align with reality.
To ensure your management team is made of heroes, of true leaders, not of narcissistic tyrants.
To ensure they hire the right people for your organizational needs, and no longer the ones suiting their dysfunctional needs for power and control.
If your employees fall ill and leave in droves, is either because your business model or your work environment are toxic. Offering then your employees £0.30 – £1/ person EAP ‘mental health support’ offered by other big corporations hiring trainee therapists on the same model of factory workers, ‘to improve their productivity’, trust me, is not going to solve the problem. In fact, is only going to add to theirs, yours, and our socioeconomic problems.
That ‘solution’, to use a real-life example, is equal to investing in a wife’s mental health support to improve her ‘resilience’ to her mentally, emotionally, and financially abusive husband. To ensure her ‘performance’, as promised by the ‘specialists’, the husband is willing to pay for some online counselling and CBT sessions specifically designed to ‘reframe the way she interprets the situation’ – i.e., the husband’s abuse.
Even if we’d offer her the best therapy and mental health coaching in the world, as long as she returns and lives under the same conditions, with the same person who expects the change and improvement to come only from her, the wife’s health and wellbeing will degrade to the point when she either leaves the husband or ends in a psychiatric ward.
No good wife leaves a good husband. No good employee leaves a good employer.
The wife’s ‘performance’, as the employee’s, is determined by two factors:
- Either the husband picked the wrong wife
- Or the wife picked the wrong husband. She eventually had enough of her husband’s failures to uphold his part in the marriage, stopped wasting her resources, and gives back only what she receives.
Equally, when the employees fail to perform, is either because the managers hired the wrong people to suit their insecurities and interests, or the employer’s business model is built on working its employees to the ground, driving employees to respond in kind.
So, addressing the cause at its root, from the top to the bottom of the management hierarchy is vital in effectively addressing employees’ mental health at work.
In fact, the whole paradigm is upside-down. It makes it sound as the problem is with the employee or the wife. Or their symptoms: i.e. their impaired mental health, are the result of the dysfunctions of others impacting their health and wellbeing. Crucial difference!
To be accurate, we should call it employers mental health support, because they are the asymptomatic carriers of dysfunctions causing illness to their employees.
Correctly diagnosing the cause to design the right intervention is key in achieving the desired results. Once you addressed the management, you need to address the work and pay conditions, the sustainability and impact of the business itself. Driving higher profit margins at the cost of wreaking the whole population and the planet is not a sustainable aim. Maybe is not ‘more of’ what you need but a diversification of products and services to match the real needs of the market and address the real issues in the world.
Ultimately, let’s call a spade a spade: Is the employee who employs the manager, not the other way around. Is the employee who pays for all the managers salaries and the CEO’s bonuses. A company could survive without managers if you employ the right people but will not survive an hour without employees doing the work.
Is the employee making the profits and paying shareholders dividends, not the other way around. And yet, how come that the ones responsible for the existence of the company and its profits are the ones paid the least?
That’s the dysfunction, right there! The rich get richer and the poor, poorer, and you wonder why they’ve lost their motivation and productivity? When they can’t pay the rent or mortgage and the salary is not sufficient to cover the bills and food, do you think that the answer is some CBT to ‘reframe’ the employees thinking to blame their condition on their ‘maladaptive thinking’ while squeezing out of them the last ounce of energy they’ve got left?
No, my friends. As a mental health & wellbeing specialist I should be beating the same drum of ‘employees mental health’, of fake ‘empowerment’ and ‘resilience building’. After all, that would be pleasing to your ears, it won’t disturb the status quo, not to mention that if I did that, I wouldn’t risk the rejection from the managers in charge with procuring employees mental health and wellbeing services, disturbed by my frank-parler.
But I cannot do that and keep my conscience clean. Because I know too well the price we are all paying due to this dysfunctional profit above people business model. Families are wrecked. Childhoods are destroyed. We have become a society of ‘mentally ill’. 1 in 4 adults and 1 in 6 children suffer now with a mental health condition caused by this economic model. £20 + billion per year are wasted by the NHS to firefight the mental health crisis caused by this dystopian work model.
And not least, because I play the long game of doing what really matters in life, not what’s convenient or financially safe.
If you are ready to address the cause, I’m here to support you, your management, and your employees.
Just drop me a line at cws@infogratielarosu.com with a brief intro, and let’s have a meeting. I will take your concerns, audit your work environment, and propose the right solutions for your team and your long-term organizational aims.
© Gratiela Rosu – Mental Health & Wellbeing Specialist, Bestselling Author, Founder of the CWS Method®
