Business management
a stand, moreover, promoting mental health can also yield financial benefits too. In short, even the Gordon Gekkos of our time can probably find something to appreciate in adopting a more thoughtful approach to mental health – especially if they’re courageous enough to take a stand themselves.
Plummeting mental health Over the past few years, global business has been wracked by crises – technological, financial and medical. On that last point, coronavirus is obviously the star of the show, with companies forced to stumble into a frantic lexicon of lockdowns and pingdemics. Yet if Covid-19 has had direct medical consequences for companies the worldover, it’s also highlighted the links between work and mental health. “The pandemic hit and this put a big, bright spotlight on mental health, especially in the workplace,” explains Jen Fisher, Deloitte’s first chief well-being officer, adding that Covid-19 undoubtedly took “a toll on everyone’s mental well-being”. It’s easy to see what she means. With WFH rules atomising the work-life balance, and the risk of furlough squatting ominously behind every deadline, staff mental health has plummeted. The statistics speak for themselves. According to one August 2020 poll, over 40% of workers reported a decline in their mental well-being since the pandemic began, a point echoed in boardrooms and corner offices too. But if the pandemic has been a psychological minefield for bosses and staff alike, Cooper and Fisher both agree it has also forced the issue further up the corporate agenda. As Fisher puts it, that’s one undoubted “silver lining” to the travails of past months. More to the point, the pandemic has arguably just accelerated a process that first started years ago. When he first moved to Silicon Valley, Cooper remembers that mental health was “still on the periphery of corporate life” and generally lumped with politics and sex as watercooler taboos. As Cooper bluntly puts it: “Illness and disability were equated with weakness.” Fortunately, these unenlightened ideas have started disappearing, even before we’d ever heard of lockdowns and travel bans. If nothing else, Cooper has witnessed the shift in his own milieu, recently noticing “more open discussions” about personal struggles and private pains. This is reflected in practical terms too. As early as 2018, firms as varied as Dow Chemicals and Bank of America had instituted mental health programmes. By 2021, spurred on by both the pandemic and the transforming power of new technology, many more companies had joined the fray, supporting employee mental health in countless useful ways. One of the most sweeping examples came courtesy of Katherine Maher, then CEO at the Wikimedia Foundation. In a viral Twitter
Chief Executive Officer /
www.the-chiefexecutive.com
Jen Fisher (pictured) says that the pandemic has highlighted the importance of mental health more than ever.
thread, Maher waived sick days and PTO for illness, deprioritised all non-essential projects and even told her team they only had to work 20 hours a week. Of course, not all firms have been quite so generous – but 98% of CEOs still agree that employee mental health will remain key even once the pandemic subsides.
“The pandemic hit and this put a big, bright spotlight on mental health, especially in the workplace.”
Jen Fisher
Cut through the stigma Cooper’s resignation post included a number of fascinating insights – but one stands out. Describing the fears he felt about stepping down from EarnUp’s CEO role, he explained that part of him “wants to jump back into the hard and important work” his start-up does. From a personal perspective, this is understandable. Just as Cooper was taking himself to ER, his company was going from strength to strength, in 2019 managing $10bn in loans. Beyond that, however, you get the sense that his uncertainty also speaks to a wider problem with how CEOs think of themselves. “We live in a white capitalist culture that tells us our productivity defines our self-worth,” Cooper emphasises. “Exhaustion is seen as a badge of honour.” He surely has a point, even beyond the rough and tumble antics of Wall Street and other corporate cliches. Once again, the polling is enlightening. In one 2018 survey, 49% of executives reported struggling with their mental health, a figure that may be double the public at large. Even more strikingly, many CEOs obviously feel obliged to stick it out. As another poll found, just 53% worry about their psychological state, compared to three quarters of regular employees. To put it another way, executives are less likely to look
60%
The percentage of American workers who are worried about their mental health in the wake of the pandemic.
PR Newswire 98%
Of all CEOs agree that employee mental health will remain key even after the pandemic subsides.
Stanford Social Innovation Review 45
Deloitte
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