It’s healthier to talk openly about mental health problems but the younger generations apparent low tolerance of stress, set backs, and life’s difficulties in general isn’t getting a sympathetic hearing from the older generation. The generation who sit on the boards of organisations and the people who occupy the leadership posts. They of course know better than to utter such opinions publicly but that doesn’t mean they are not thinking it and saying it in private. And bear in mind these are the people who set the tone of an organisation.
This reminds me of the attitudes in many board rooms to Equality and Diversity a decade or so ago. The view expressed privately that they didn’t see it as a problem that there were no women on the board or no black senior managers in the organisation. Yet they were happy to sign up to a EDI policy, because of course it was wrong to discriminate.
This difference between public commitment and private utterances may explain some of the tensions HR are expected to resolve. An organisation that claims to want to take the health and well-being of employees seriously yet where senior managers still see long hours as demonstrating committed , pay more attention to competence than behaviour and expect managers to demonstrate resilience. An organisation prone to promoting managers on the bases of their technical competence and knowledge without due regard to their people management skills.
The real issue is not whether or not the younger generation is more willing to talk about “mental well-being” but how aware and proactive the organisation is.
We refer to mental health problems and may be we assume it’s about encouraging people to talk about how they are feeling. That it’s about managers and colleagues having the confidence to ask someone how they are and not backing off if they don’t say “fine”. But it’s about much more than this it about recognising, bullying, sexual harassment and racism can result in depression. It’s about recognising an overbearing , demanding, inflexible, distrusting management style causes stress and anxiety. It’s about being subjected to this behaviour day in day out and being unable to get it to stop. It’s about the organisations failure to recognise the size of the problem and effectively deal with it. It’s about a tendency to try and resolve cases of bullying and sexual harassment rather than dismissing offenders. It’s about the need to establish the work place as a safe environment. A place to speak about how work is making you feel. A place that takes the individuals mental health and well-being seriously.
