Cases of depression and anxiety increased 25% with the pandemic, how does it affect work?

Carolina Ramírez was promoted, but no one else was hired to support her. A month later, her boss left the company, her area was left incomplete, and she took on more duties than she could cover. When she resigned, “she had been working for four months from 9 in the morning to 11 at night, and without rest on weekends. This had already caused me havoc on my mental health. I lost four kilos in a week of meetings, I had insomnia, depression, gastritis and I even vomited in the morning”, she says.

“Work can be a protective factor for mental health, but it can also contribute to its potential damage”, warn the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Through a series of guidelines so that companies can address psychosocial risk factors, the organizations warn that conditions such as anxiety and depression have grown 25% globally due to the pandemic.

Work overload, excessive working hours, negative leadership, lack of support among colleagues, no autonomy over the tasks performed and poor job design, among many other aspects, are part of a long list of psychosocial risk factors in companies, that is, elements that can represent damage to people’s mental health.

As Jorge Mérida, creative partner of the Advisory Network for Wellbeing firm, points out, “work itself does not harm health, but the aspects that are linked to it do”. The good news, underlines the specialist, is that all the factors that represent a risk for the workforce “are completely controllable.”

The increase in the affectations to mental health implies a major challenge for companies, point out the ILO and the WHO. The unsafe and unhealthy work environments “can undermine mental health” and a poor condition in this harms the person’s development, but also their ability to work.

According to AON monitoring, work overload, excessive working hours and lack of control over daily tasks are the highest psychosocial risks in companies in Mexico.

In the experience of Ivonne Borden, founder and director of the firm Adding Value, “many of the mental health risks at work are due to the great disorder that exists in the organizational structures in Mexico. We have double processes that lead to double work, that’s why the days become endless, for example”.

Specialists agree that mental health risks not only affect employees, they also have repercussions for businesses. The ILO and the WHO estimate that for this reason 12,000 million working days are lost each year and 1 trillion dollars at the global level.

Jorge Mérida describes this as “a vicious circle”, in which the work centers do not take preventive actions to reduce risks for the collaborators and the suffering of the workers translates into absenteeism, high rotationpoor performance and a high level of incidents.

“The manifestations of mental health problems affect work. We can see errors in production, sales not made or major accidents. This is the impact that mental health has on companies”, he exposes.

How to address the challenge in companies?

“They told me that I was a coward for not taking risks,” says Carolina. When she notified Human Resources her desire to quit because the workload had already overwhelmed her, confronted the stigma that still exists around mental health in the workplace.

From Ivonne Borden’s perspective, wellness plans are good, but when they are accompanied by a strategy and follow-up. “Sometimes we believe that if we put a ping-pong room or phrases throughout the office, that is already a good organizational culture, and we fall into an organizational make-up in which everything looks nice, but it is not resolved in the background.”

A Dale Hype investigation in corporates identified that, despite having wellness strategies, 80% of employees continue to experience work stress.

Beyond the wellness, ILO and WHO They recommend actions to companies such as establishing adequate workloads, respecting schedules, implementing flexible work, fostering support among colleagues, developing new skills in leaders, among other measures, which are often free of cost and can help reduce risks. psychosocial.

For Jorge Mérida, an important point is the strengthening of the occupational health areas. In a monitoring carried out by his firm among professionals from these departments, they detected that 26% report that his resources are limited to attend to mental health problems of workers.

“We must accept that it is important to have resources to remedy what could no longer be prevented, because that means that the environment was so complex, and probably continues to be so complex, that even prevention programs most solids have limitations. And an important point is that occupational teams don’t have tools to support people,” he notes.

The upgrade project disease table promoted by the Ministry of Labor (STPS) includes the recognition, for the first time, of disorders such as stress, anxiety, depression and alteration of the sleep-wake cycle as conditions due to factors associated with work.