The importance of championing mental health in the workplace

Posted 2 years ago

Poor mental health is a growing and considerable concern within UK workplaces. Evidence suggests that mental health issues are responsible for almost 12.7% of all sickness absence days across the country.

One of the biggest challenges with tackling poor mental health is removing the stigma that surrounds it. It can be very common to ignore emotional and mental health issues, as they are often deemed too embarrassing, confusing or scary to talk about.

But this really does need to change. After all, happier, more contented staff make for productive and successful team members. Put simply, good mental health is a win-win for employees, employers and their organisations.

Your safest business investment to date

Investing in the mental health of your staff pays dividends. Research suggests that for every £1 you invest into employee mental health, you’ll receive up to £5.30 in return! So with this in mind, more UK businesses need to start paying more attention to properly addressing mental health and removing the unfair stigma that, for some reason, surrounds it.

Ethically supporting staff’s mental health is the right thing to do, and it speaks volumes about your work culture. Employers that take the subject of mental health seriously help to ensure higher engagement levels and productivity, not to mention drastically lessen absence rates and secures the retention of talent!

Why emotional intelligence is beneficial in the workplace

Let us explain why emotional intelligence is beneficial in the workplace. Emotional intelligence (also known as EI) is the ability to recognise, understand, and appropriately respond to the emotions in ourselves and others.

The most significant benefit of having strong emotional intelligence is that it can greatly increase a person’s happiness. As a result of effective training, your employees can grasp the skills needed to overcome certain situations and help them become less stressed, resulting in a happier and more productive day with better communication throughout your team. Other benefits of emotional intelligence include:

Better decision making & problem solving
Improved composure
Improved self awareness
More easily resolve conflicts
Handle constructive criticism better
Improved job satisfaction & performance
Emotional self regulation

How to measure emotional intelligence in the workplace

Emotional intelligence does not come naturally to everyone, and it can take a little time to get it right. But by supplying regular and effective training you can help strengthen your employees’ emotional intelligence.

Unfortunately, whilst models of measuring emotional intelligence assessments are out there, there isn’t an accurate measure of a person’s emotional intelligence. But a person with strong emotional intelligence is easily identifiable by a number of characteristics, such as active listening, social awareness and intrinsic motivation. You will be able to see your employees develop and improve in areas such as conflict resolution, decision making, responding to constructive criticism and problem-solving.

Online Mental Health & Wellbeing Training courses

Here at iHasco, we offer a variety of Mental Health & Wellbeing courses that are designed for any level of employee across all industry sectors.

Some of our most popular courses in this bundle include:

By providing staff with this training, we hope we can play our part in helping to raise awareness on understanding, recognising, and managing mental ill health as well as maintaining and celebrating good mental wellbeing.

Claim your free, no-obligation trial to any of the courses today! Alternatively, you can request a bespoke quote, and a member of our team will be in touch to discuss your training requirements. Also don’t forget to take a look at our most popular courses which include soft skills training, health & safety courses, and our compliance courses.