Workable Techniques to Improve Workplace Mental Health

These techniques can be actualized in the workplace with a little effort from the side of management. Further efforts depend on the creativity of top-level management to make workplaces more open, stress-free, and relaxing for employees. 

The World Health Organization estimates that the global economy suffers a massive loss of 1 trillion US dollars every year in terms of productivity because of depression and anxiety. The finding reflects the poor state of mental health planning in our workplaces. It is also alarming to know that people spend a significant portion of their time at a place where they are in distress.

It is indeed high time that we take proactive measures to make work culture more employee-friendly. Many well-known companies are running innovative workplace wellness programs to ease employees physically and mentally. For example, Intuit offers its employees reimbursable expenses for availing themselves of mindfulness and meditation classes. Besides, it also encourages employees to go for stress-reduction habits like taking a walk, breathing exercises, listening to music, etc.

Now, many of the companies who run employee wellness programs are corporations, and it may not be possible to emulate those best practices everywhere. So here we discuss some techniques that you can implement at your workplace irrespective of its size and nature:

Make Work Creative
One of the reasons people get easily frustrated is when they think that they are doing the same thing again and again. It is important here to see that employees believe they are repeating work and a monotonous attitude gathers anxiety and depression quickly. So the first step towards making your workplace healthy is to make work more creative work for your employees.

The best way is to eliminate the passive elements from work and make it more dynamic. Today, technology empowers us to make it happen even in a static workplace. For example, make your meetings a stand-up meeting, standing up itself gives a level of alertness to the body and makes work more playful. Add elements of a game into work. Some companies like Caesars Palace mix games and work to keep employees in a playful mood and thus get the best creative output from them. 

The logic is simple, no one gets bored playing, but everyone finds work boredom, then the solution is blur the work-play line and set your team into action. One could use document management systems and other automated workflows to keep track of overall work. One of the essential benefits of document management systems and other automated systems is that they bring in an opportunity for self-reflection in employees because machines appear unbiased in their evaluation when compared to a human. 

Integrate Meditative Tools

Of the many other ways to combat depression in the workplace, integrative tools are the most effective. HR technologies like punching softwares, DMS, performance management systems, etc. can easily add a meditation tool as a plugin. Even mobile applications like Buddhify, Calm, etc. can be handy. The most straightforward tool if you can afford to develop it is an analogue clock. The technique involves looking at the second hand of the clock as it moves from one second to the next. As the needle moves from one point to another, the employee says “I am here”. And this goes on for about 20 minutes. The tool can be used whenever an employee feels depressed or out of focus.

Healthy Diet Planning
The state of your mind and the food you eat are very much related. Modern scientific findings have found correlations between mind and food, but the real insight comes from the ancient system of medicine, the Ayurveda. Ayurvedic understanding of food has resulted in a three-tier classification according to the effect it has on our emotions. The three classifications are as follows:

1. 1. Sattvic diet – includes food items that bring mental harmony and promotes conscious response. Examples – fresh vegetables, rice, milk, butter, honey, nuts, fruits.
   2. Rajasic diet – food that stimulates fantasy, jealousy, and ego comes under rajas. The examples are garlic, coffee, wine, fried food, fish, highly spicy, and hot food.
   3. Tamasic diet – food items that are frozen, roots of certain vegetables, peanuts, meats, and food that need more time to digest fall under this category.

So to start with, encouraging food with these principles in mind can go to the very roots of mental health. But this ancient wisdom needs to be implemented with the principles of Ayurveda. The change of diet should not be rapid but spanning over a three-month or six-month period. And, this change of habit shouldn’t be in any way imposed on the participant. Instead, it should come out of an understanding of the effect. The best approach is to keep time for thought observation after dieting. Employees can have a sattvic meal in the morning and observe their thoughts and then a tamasic or rajasic lunch and observe their thoughts and a sattvic dinner and watch. Over the period, they are bound to see this relationship and, on their own, adopt the new diet for joy and productivity. Of all the techniques, this technique is essential, and at the same time, it is equally important to give employees total freedom in adopting them at their own pace.

These techniques can be actualized in the workplace with a little effort from the side of management. Further efforts depend on the creativity of top-level management to make workplaces more open, stress-free, and relaxing for employees.