As the boundaries between work and life became increasingly blurred over the past two years, people experienced a significant impact on mental health. But, the stigma surrounding mental health in the workplace has remained, and organisations must tackle this as employees attempt to regain work-life balance two years into the global pandemic.
But before organisations can look to implement strategies that aim to boost mental health in the workplace, they have to assess the impact of the pandemic on employees.
Frederik Anseel, Professor of Management and Senior Deputy Dean (Research & Enterprise) at UNSW Business School says the different cycles of the pandemic and resulting lockdowns have affected workers in several ways.
Since the start of COVID-19, Prof. Anseel has been interested in quantifying the pandemic’s psychological effects and helped co-authors’ studies that examine some of the implications, issues and insights into how COVID-19 has affected the workplace. He speaks on this topic in the Business of Mental Health – the sixth episode of The Business of Leadership Podcast, hosted by AGSM at UNSW Business School.
The psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic
In the beginning, those with steady jobs, including many knowledge workers, were mainly concerned with simply transitioning to working online. That transition went pretty well until the boundaries between work and home life became increasingly blurred, explains Prof. Anseel.
“Over the months, we saw different sorts of distress and mental health problems… because the boundaries between work-life balance were jeopardised and undermined,” he says.
Home-schooling, loss of income, isolation from peers, family and friends, and an uncertain future all impacted the well-being of employees and workplaces and led to increased levels of emotional distress.
“And, the distress is, of course, that people start worrying while they’re doing their jobs, but also in the evening and during the night and there were a lot of sleep problems. And, as people start worrying, people are draining their mental resources.”
Navigating working online and home life during a global pandemic has significantly drained employees’ resources and ability to function, and many have experienced cognitive fatigue.
And what happens when people experience mental fatigue?
“People have trouble concentrating at work, and they become less productive… it’s almost a cycle,” explains Prof. Anseel. “People notice that they become less productive. So they start worrying about that as well,” he says. So at a time when everyone needed to be more accepting and kinder to themselves, they have been pushing themselves to work harder, which exhausted them even further, leading to a toxic cycle of burnout.
“And so people were stuck almost in a cycle of, let’s say, self-talk, worry, more self-talk, observing how difficult everything was, also working from home, sometimes feeling lonely, isolated, not having their normal social support/their network that they could talk to,” he says.
“You have this constant cycle, which reinforced the problems. Some people got out of that, let’s say, on their own, in their own family and getting themselves together. For others, it was very difficult.”