How to take care of mental health when returning to offices or hybrid work?
“In hybrid work, the risk of isolation can be counteracted with personal meetings as long as common office hours are used for development meetings and social activities and not to continue working autonomously as is done at home.
In other words, at home you should work autonomously and hold coordination meetings, while in the office it should be a space not for autonomous work but for social work”, explained the specialist from the business school.
And, for business leaders and their HR teams, he recommended taking the following actions:
- Foster positive, future-oriented relationships, building trust
- Focus on solutions and not problems
- Create strategies that guide people forward
- Generate psychologically safe environments where people can openly express their doubts. And, consequently, avoid their opposites.
The responsibility also belongs to the worker.
Although the law asks companies to guarantee environments for the physical and mental health of workers, they also have something to do about it.
“The first effort always comes from the company, which must build virtual and also physical spaces so that people can connect (…) to have more human connections, but it is not enough,” says Sergio Nouvel, CEO of Get on Board, a platform to connect Latin American tech talent with companies from all over the world.
For Sergio Nouvel, the responsibility to maintain an environment of inclusion in times of remote work also belongs to the worker.
“There were people very comfortable with an office dynamic where it was enough for them to see me ‘working’, doing nothing, with the screen on, it was enough. Remotely it is no longer like that, you have to communicate all the time, give visibility and deliberately show how You show what you’re doing to the rest of the team. And it’s important to give visibility to your day, whether you’re feeling good or bad.”
Companies, for their part, must encourage this communicative openness to be more flexible and guarantee the comprehensive health of their collaborators, indicates Nouvel. Another recommendation from the CEO of Get on Board is that companies implement work models with flexible hours and asynchronous activities, oriented towards results.