The Answers Are Obvious, The Bosses Don’t Care

Summary

Executives often fail to address the core workplace issues that negatively impact employee mental health, instead opting for superficial wellness initiatives.

Abstract

The article titled "The Answers Are Obvious, The Bosses Don’t Care" highlights a disconnect between executives' understanding of employee mental health and the actual stressors in the workplace. It suggests that while leaders may acknowledge the importance of mental health, they often delegate responsibility to HR or wellness programs without recognizing that the primary source of stress is the work environment itself. The article cites research by Dave Whiteside of YMCA WorkWell, which indicates that job-related factors are the most significant contributors to workers' mental health struggles. It criticizes the tendency of executives to complicate the issue to avoid accountability, leading to ineffective solutions like "wellness Wednesdays" or meditation apps. The author argues that true improvement in mental health requires tangible changes in the workplace, such as addressing toxic management, setting clear behavioral guidelines, and ensuring reasonable workloads and conditions.

Opinions

Executives often lack genuine concern for employees' mental health, defaulting to HR or wellness programs without addressing root causes.
The biggest factor affecting workers' mental health is the work itself, including toxic environments and lack of support.
Efforts to make "mental health" a complex corporate initiative are seen as a way to evade executive responsibility for creating stressful work conditions.
Therapy and mindfulness apps are insufficient for dealing with external work-related issues like bad management, excessive workloads, and poor working conditions.
The author believes that significant improvements in employee mental health require organizational changes, such as removing toxic managers and fostering empathy from the outset.
Suggesting that employees can overcome poor working conditions through therapy or self-improvement is considered condescending and ineffective.
Executives should be held accountable for implementing practical solutions to improve employees' work lives, rather than offering superficial wellness initiatives.

The Answers Are Obvious, The Bosses Don’t Care

If you ask the average executive about their employees’ mental health, they’ll usually say something related to wellness, mindfulness, or “self care.” If pushed further, said executive will refer to the HR department, or perhaps to some sort of nebulous internal program to “help employees deal with the stress of a challenging world.”

The reason that they do this is because they don’t really know what’s happening in their company, but they also don’t really care, because if they did, they’d realize that you can’t use therapy to beat a shitty job.

Dave Whiteside, Director of Insights at YMCA WorkWell, shared some of his research around how companies could support their employees’ mental health, and the findings are incredible. Apparently, the biggest thing affecting workers’ mental health is…their work? What? Am I reading this right? You’re saying that the stress of work can be reduced by work being less stressful? NO!

I am, of course, being quite sarcastic.

In every single job where I’ve felt that I had any kind of mental health issue, it’s come down to a combination of lacking any meaningful support and working in a toxic environment. While bad situations from your personal life can bleed into your professional one, the inverse is far more likely — you spend hours at work, surrounded by people you work with, doing work until you’re allowed to leave work.

Many executives want to make this situation as complex as humanely possible, because it obfuscates their role — and thus their responsibility — in what actually causes these problems. If you make “mental health” a monolith, you turn it into something that becomes an ‘initiative’ that the company must ‘consider and ‘organize themselves around.’ Once something is an initiative, it’s “everybody’s role to get involved,” and thus solutions no longer have any responsibilities to the problem itself — because “the hard work must be done to make this part of our company culture,” meaning that your company now has “wellness Wednesdays” and you get access to a company app with guided meditations.

The reality is that the biggest mental health problem you face at work is your job. You cannot therapy your way out of bad colleagues, bad management, having too much work, having too little time to complete tasks, a lack of resources, or bad work conditions. Talking to someone about your problems may make you feel better, but therapy does not deal with external problems. And while you can change your perception of whatever situation you’re in, when things suck, they suck. They’re bad. Working with assholes is terrible. Working for assholes is terrible. Too much work is not something you can Mind Master Yourself Out Of.

It’s also extremely condescending to suggest you can.

The things that an organization has to do to significantly improve the mental health of their workers is make their lives easier. This may seem straightforward, but oftentimes requires tough decisions like firing toxic managers and making clear-set guidelines about what behavior is acceptable (or unacceptable). It also requires a level of organizational introspection and empathy that doesn’t exist unless you’re extremely intentional in building it from day one.

So the next time an executive mentions “wellness” or “mental health,” ask them what they’re specifically doing about it.

And if they say anything about apps, scream at them until they cry.