Good decisions and caring for each other make a company strong
HeBA looked at how people in the labor market felt and perceived their emotional well-being throughout the previous year. Health monitoring of our partner companies’ employees formed an interesting general picture of the state of mental health and changes in 2020.
What we saw was that the onset of the pandemic brought a lot of anxiety and uncertainty. People’s self-assessed life stress increased by 2x when the pandemic arrived and then moved throughout the year in the same rhythm as the restrictions imposed to control the infection.
At the beginning of the year, work stress was also high. However, this receded into the background at the end of spring. The multifaceted support of the companies themselves to their employees – both in the form of rapid changes in work arrangements, consistent communication and encouragement – and the wage subsidies guaranteed by the state during critical months probably helped to mitigate work stress. People themselves focused on organizing their daily lives – how to organize the day of home-schooled children, how to help their parents, how to continue normal communication with friends and compensate for the lack of normal leisure activities.
In terms of work-related well-being, an interesting trend emerges – lack of time at work and work conflicts go hand in hand. This can be understood in the sense that if someone is often short on time in terms of work organization, normal communication will not take place – misunderstandings, miscommunications, mistakes and conflict situations will arise in different places of the work network, even where there does not seem to be a lack of time at all.
Therefore, it is very important for the management of the company to know what is happening in the company – what are the common factors that affect the quality of working life in certain groups, whether people feel valued. It is also important that different sectors and different occupations have their own characteristics that must be taken into account in order to organize work well.
We are pleased to note that many HeBA partner companies understand how good decisions and caring for each other make the company strong.
See how employee well-being was affected in 2020 in HeBA’s mental health report.
