Even though the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided, it has left a lasting mark on the mental health of workers. The most lasting effect of the pandemic has been the psychosocial impact. But technology can play a central role in well-being at work.
Workers and businesses are facing a notable increase in mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders among employees. While in 2022 44% of employers observed a rise in these concernsthis figure increased to 77% in 2023. Additionally, 16% of employers expect another increase in the future, according to a 2023 Business Group on Health. investigation.
“This is where all the cumulative trauma of the pandemic is happening. burnout rate on the labor market, economic injuries and their impact on mental health. Essentially, the world has only just gone through the last wave of the pandemic over the last two quarters. We saw record levels of mental health around the world, and in the United States the situation was particularly bad. But I think we could come out of this,” said Aaron McEwan, vice president of research and consulting at Gartner.
Response to mental health needs
Organizations are responding to the need for mental health services in the workplace. “In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 70% of companies introduced new wellness benefits or increased the amount of existing wellness benefits. Today, 96% of companies offer mental wellness programs,” McEwan said: citing Gartner research.
The organizations also benefit from support from the federal government. The Surgeon General’s first-ever framework for workplace mental health and well-being was released in 2022. The aim of the framework is to support workplaces as “engines of well-being” which perpetuate well-being at work.
Although there has been positive development, there is still work to be done. Many employees do not use the support offered. Traditional remedies Like yoga, mindfulness and resilience training do not address the root causes of burnout and mental health issues. They can even add stress to employees’ already busy workday.
“What we’re seeing today is that organizations are taking a more preventative approach to mental health. They are starting to recognize that the real root causes of poor mental health in the workplace, such as poor work design, under-resourced teams, people working longer hours than they should be…” , McEwan said.
APA Data 2023 Work in America The investigation shows that these root causes undermine the essential needs outlined in the Surgeon General’s framework for mental health in the workplace:
- Only 40% of workers say their leave is respected, which shows a lack of harmony between professional and private life.
- People who feel their work is meaningless are more likely to report feeling stressed during the workday. 45% of respondents who said their work was meaningful reported feeling stressed during the workday, compared to 71% who said their work was meaningless.
- Workers who reported good or excellent mental health reported being significantly more satisfied with growth opportunities, underscoring the need for adequately resourced teams. 79% of workers satisfied with growth opportunities reported good or excellent mental health. 52% of workers dissatisfied with growth opportunities reported good or excellent mental health.
The role of technology
Emerging technologies can give employees the ability to voluntarily provide more specific data about their work experience through job posting platforms and tracking apps. Organizations can then take a more preventative approach and transform workplaces into “engines of well-being,” addressing the root causes of mental health issues and meeting employee needs in accordance with the Surgeon General’s framework.
AI is also showing promise in helping organizations address these root causes. As automation and AI often increase concerns about job loss, they show promise in terms of job creation and improvement. “Generally speaking, we see that these types of technologies end up creating more jobs than they destroy,” McEwan said. McEwan went on to explain that AI can improve mental health in the workplace by improving job design. AI can ensure employees complete tasks that engage them and complete them by reducing mundane and tedious tasks to give employees more autonomy and flexibility. Additionally, on the experimental side, emerging technologies can be used to monitor mental disorders and Emotional impact work on employees with tools such as sentiment analysis.
Smartwatches and others wearable technology can also play a greater role in organizations’ ability to provide preventative mental health offerings to their employees with more detailed information and data to report. “One of the things we’re starting to see is employees using this type of technology to monitor the impact of their work on their own health and make decisions based on that data. So you might decide to leave a job because your personal tracking data it shows you it’s not good for your health,” McEwan said.
Employees and data aggregators could then share this information across job recruitment platforms in the same way, they traditionally give personal testimonies about their professional experience. “Glassdoors of the future are more likely to use aggregated data from smartwatches. You might get a list of companies with the lowest average resting heart rate or companies whose employees have optimal sleep or (those that have the) happiest employees. That kind of future is approaching very quickly,” McEwan said.
This hypothetical future would depend on the ability of organizations to provide this equipment to their employees. In some sectors, this is already a reality. “The use of secure tracking technology is well established. This has been around for over 10 years. Some of the world’s largest mining companies will use caps that their employees wear to track microsleep risk, helping them avoid falling asleep while operating equipment on a mining site, for example,” McEwan said.
Employees want to share and consume information about working conditions on platforms such as Glassdoor, Reddit and TikTok. “I think what’s missing at this point (is) there’s no way for employees to necessarily share their own data with an aggregator site. We know at this point that 56% of employees consume employee-generated information about their work and activities. Fifty-two percent of employees surveyed would be willing to share their anonymized data about their well-being in public forums like Glassdoor,” McEwan said, referring to data from the Gartner 2023 Employee Perspectives on the Future of Work Survey.
More than half of employees would decide to apply for a job if they could see this data, and 46% would be influenced by this data on their decision to stay in a job, according to the same study.
Employers seek to build trust
“Organizations that create healthy environments and care for their employees will continue to have (the most) access to top talent,” McEwan said.
Even though more than half of employees would be willing to provide anonymized health data to aggregators to improve their job understanding, employees must trust their managers and the employer. “Employees will not provide you with this data unless you use it to improve the workplace and work experience. People are quite happy to provide their data to organizations if it gives them a better experience as a customer. Organizations will need to be clear about what they collect, how they use it, what decisions it influences and what the benefits are for those employees,” McEwan said.
