“Trust that your yoga mat, your yoga practice, has your back,” says the instructor as she encourages the viewer to lean in onto the mat and surrender the back pain that this practice was intended for. Two thoughts come to mind as I complete this practice and prepare to (virtually) go to work. First is how yoga has been personally helpful in managing the stress and anxiety of working from home during a pandemic, and second is how encouraging it is to hear someone say he or she got your back.
In February 2020, the Department of Labor and Employment released Department Order No. 208 (“D.O. 208”) that sets out the guidelines for implementing mental health workplace policies and programs of the private sector. Under this order, private companies must integrate into their occupational health and safety policies strategies to promote and enhance workers’ mental health and well-being. This does not just include the promotion and protection of worker’s mental health and common conditions but also strategies to identify and manage work-related stress and stressors. A year after its release, how far are private companies in its implementation? Does human resources have the sole responsibility of carrying out these programs’ policies?
In a qualitative study by Jimmieson and three other professors, the authors explored different strategies on how Australian supervisors can identify, manage and respond to employee stress, citing the supervisor’s critical role in managing occupational stress and well-being of employees.
Work-related stress has been identified as the most dangerous psychological hazard in their country, and thus, organizations have been mandated to put in place strategies to maintain what they call as a “psychologically safe workplace.”
I share the implicit message of the author’s article as well as the guideline in DO 208 concerning the need to build the capacity of managers to manage mental health. That maintaining psychologically safe workplaces is not the sole responsibility of the human resource department but more so of the supervisors. After all, supervisors are the ones in direct contact with their employees, and there has even been evidence in other studies pointing out that supervisors are the common source of workplace negative behaviors and, consequently, employee stress.
So, what can we do as supervisors? The yoga mat and the previously mentioned authors can teach us a thing or two.
Show your employees that “I got you.” First, our employees should feel that “we got their back.” Supervisor support can never be reiterated enough, especially that we’re all navigating workplace dynamics that most of us were unfamiliar with until now. Many of our employees will commit mistakes or need a lot of guidance to perform their tasks. But what they would need right now are not just clearer instructions or documents outlining guidelines but our understanding and patience. Poor performance in this setup should not be taken at face value as this could be an obvious sign that the employee is undergoing workplace stress.
Be attentive to changes in employees’ emotions and behavior. Jimmieson and her co-authors have identified several themes that can be helpful even in our context. One is being mindful of such changes in our employees’ disposition, behavior and reactions. The virtual setup may provide some challenges in how we will be able to detect signs of employee stress, but one of the themes the authors have also mentioned is the changes in both oral and online communication style. This would need from us the attention we pay to things we would usually neglect and attribute to someone having a bad day.
Talk about it. The third and probably the most difficult to do given our culture is to have the openness to talk about workplace stress. In the study, feedback from the employees themselves or a co-worker who has observed his colleague remains the most common source of information for supervisors regarding employee stress. We need to initiate conversations about it. Still, we must also be prepared to take concrete action plans to address workplace stress, whether it be an adjustment in workload or other issues our employees may raise.
Take care of yourself. We all know the saying. We cannot pour from an empty cup. It is difficult to address our employees’ stress when we are dealing with our own concerns. While this was listed last, I believe it is the most important one. We may also be experiencing our own stress and anxiety, but it does not excuse us to exercise our responsibility as supervisors to maintain not just a productive workplace but a psychologically safe one.
Mental health awareness may still have a long way to go here in the Philippines. But with the release of DOLE Order No. 208, it provides some hope to move an issue that is of great importance, especially at these current times. As majority of workers continue to be in a work from home setup where they are vulnerable to feelings of isolation, lack of work-life balance, not to mention the stress and anxiety due to the pandemic, the conversation on maintaining a psychologically safe workplace, whether in a physical or in a remote setup, should begin an all workplaces.
Jessica Jaye Ranieses is a Doctor of Business Administration student at the Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business of De La Salle University. She finished her MBA at the same university. She is currently the senior high school vice principal at iACADEMY. She can be reached at jessranieses@gmail.com.