Overcoming Anxiety At Work

As the COVID-19 pandemic winds down in the US, workplaces are slowly coming back to life. Along with navigating new logistical challenges, though, managers will have to tackle stubborn old issues that have never gone away. For many managers, this includes worker anxiety.

The most important requirement is a manager who’s open and empathetic

Few people have thought about this topic as much as Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick, authors of the book Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done. I recently spoke with Elton to learn what managers can do to help employees reduce their stress levels. Here’s what he had to say…

Fostering psychological safety in the workplace

We are teetering on the edge of a national mental health crisis and a potential mass exodus of top talent as secondary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The question remains whether your organisation is prepared and how you can sustain a healthy workforce through this crisis.

We are currently in the most buoyant job market in almost 20 years and have gained confidence in the economy since the beginning of the pandemic. However, COVID-19’s toll on mental health has bubbled away in the background and is only now beginning to filter through to the workplace.

The lived experience of Australians in the global pandemic continues to evolve, with work and family life having returned, for the most part, to normal. But lingering effects from the turmoil of last year will start to take hold even after the immediate danger of COVID-19 has passed. 

Medical experts refer to this stage as the ‘fourth wave’ of a pandemic, an incoming influx of mental health issues due to the pandemic, but not the virus itself.

These impacts on mental health are both long-term and hard-to-reverse. To future proof themselves, organisations can make small adjustments to their working environment to prepare for the acute and long-term impacts of COVID-19…