Since 2020, and even before, the world of work has given a special place to the emotional health of employees.
Many companies began adding hybrid or remote work to their benefits, giving employees a greater opportunity to strike a better balance between their jobs and their family life.
Companies also began rolling out initiatives to support employee wellbeing both at work and at home — everything from apps that help with nutrition and physical health to financial education, among others.
In this article, we'll cover what emotional health is, how to identify it in your employees, how to promote it, and the benefits that good emotional health brings us as individuals and as organizations.
What is emotional health?
Emotional health is a person's ability to handle emotions during extraordinary, adverse, or stressful situations.
This also includes how we respond to something very good, such as an excellent result.
It's important to distinguish emotional health from mental health. These terms are often confused, but the latter relates to our mind's ability to process our external world and our reality, while emotional health is how we react to it.
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Why is emotional health important?
Emotional health, while a term that has always existed, has become a particularly relevant topic today.
As a person's emotional health improves, so does their ability to function appropriately in both their professional and personal lives, as well as their ability to connect with other people.
How do you measure emotional health?
It's relatively easy to identify when someone has serious emotional problems. You'll typically notice symptoms like lack of concentration, apathy, low productivity, disinterest in others, or severe anxiety disorders.
But identifying employees who are just beginning to struggle is much harder. It isn't easy to notice those first changes or symptoms, especially when it comes to a burnout syndrome that develops gradually.
1. Questionnaires.
A quick, anonymous, and unobtrusive way to detect trends in employees' emotional health is by applying questionnaires designed to identify emotional problems.
2. Train leaders.
Training your organization's leaders on how to promote good emotional health, and how to detect emotional problems in their teams, goes a long way toward preventing issues or catching them early.
3. Enable communication or reporting channels.
Giving employees a communication mechanism, one that can be anonymous, makes it easier for them to raise a flag when they're going through a problem themselves, or when they've noticed it in a coworker.
Benefits of good emotional health at work
Once you've identified which factors are hurting your employees' emotional health, you should build a detailed action plan that includes:
1. Greater wellbeing and happiness.
The time we spend at work every day, even now that we probably do it from home much of the time, makes up a large part of our wellbeing and happiness. If we're able to handle work emotionally well, that will show up in the rest of our lives.
2. Higher productivity.
An immediate effect of greater wellbeing in our lives is an improvement in our productivity. We can make better use of all our skills when we're emotionally healthy.
3. Better relationships at work.
As every member of the team improves their emotional health, it becomes easier for them to relate to one another.
4. Lower turnover.
Employees quickly notice when an organization cares about their wellbeing, and this becomes a major factor in their career decisions.
