You can't live off a good purpose alone
Summary
We spend many hours in our workplace and during that time many things happen to us: we interact, we become stressed, we get excited and we become unmotivated. In short, our workplace, its conditions and its conditioning factors greatly influence our mental health. Organizations are increasingly committed to creating healthy work environments. What is the key to achieve it?
In recent years, awareness of work-related stress and other psychosocial risks associated with the job has increased. There is increasing evidence that organizations can play an important role in the face of emotional or mental health problems suffered by their collaborators, regardless of whether the origin is at work or not.
Currently, there are few doubts about the question of whether work stress can affect physical and mental health: six out of ten professionals admit that work stress has caused them some illness and 7% have had to be hospitalized for this reason, according to studies developed by Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer (Pfeffer, 2018).
Watch the video
Managing People's Emotional Well-being
No one is free from complex problems, not even organizations with such a good reputation as Amnesty International (AI). The famous NGO jumped into the media last year as an organization with a toxic work culture after the suicide of two of its workers.
An entity with such an attractive purpose as protecting and promoting human rights was embroiled in accusations of mobbing, public humiliation, and racist and sexist discrimination. In its defense, it should be said that it was the AI itself that commissioned an internal investigation that uncovered all these problems after the two deaths. Among other devastating data, they found 39% of employees claimed to have mental and physical health problems as a result of their work in the organization.
At Amnesty International, the problem had nothing to do with people's motivation. The report made clear that many employees viewed their work as a "calling or life cause" that gave them an exciting meaning to what they did. But such commitment turned out to be a double-edged sword: the managers believed that the importance of the NGO's work was so great that they did not need to listen to the concerns of their employees; and workers found it difficult to limit their hours due to a deep belief in organizational mission.
Among the improvement proposals that AI's study concluded, the following stand out:
- Promote a feeling of security and trust.
- Replace the culture of criticism and blame with a 'culture of development'.
- Apply a comprehensive and systematic approach to improving people's well-being.
- Offer more support for stress-related problems.
- Better train managers to achieve all of these goals.
In short, no matter how high and unquestionable the purpose of an organization may be, you cannot live on it alone. A truly healthy workplace is one in which workers and managers collaborate in a process of continuous improvement to protect and promote the health, safety and well-being of all.
Without going any further, the World Health Organization offers a global model guide to achieve healthy work environments, this being a comprehensive way of thinking and acting that addresses: a model of action, physical and psychosocial risks related to work, promotion of healthy behaviors and social and environmental determinants.
The guide can be summarized in five keys that will keep companies healthy and away from toxicity and stress:
- Management involvement and commitment.
- Involve workers and their representatives.
- Ethics and business legality.
- Use of a systematic and comprehensive process to ensure continuous improvement and effectiveness.
- Sustainability and integration.
Documentos y enlaces
Featuring
