In our podcast «Happy@Work» we meet with the best international experts and discuss different topics. We met with Georgia Homsany (USA), founder of «Daily Dose» to discuss a very interesting and important topic — mental health.
Georgia is one of the best experts in well-being, working with companies. And we discussed this topic from the personal and corporate perspective.
About Georgia:
She is a New Jersey native. She spent the first half of her career doing marketing and brand management for different industries for about 15 years or so. Then she had actually reached a point of burnout at her last job, decided to leave, and lived abroad for a couple of months to try and figure out what she wanted to do next. Then she started her own company «Daily Dose». She helps companies to bring more wellness to the workplace.
Tatiana: Mental health is a priority for all people now, what do you think, about how people work with their mental health, and what employers can do for their employees?
Georgia: We do need to break it down into what people can do on a personal level and then how that affects things in the workplace and how management can get involved in it. The first thing I would say for people is to just be mindful of how they’re feeling because especially in the US we move at a very quick pace. We’re just doing the same thing every day and we start to function almost on autopilot. We don’t stop to think about how am I feeling, and how are the things I’m spending my time doing, impacting me. The easiest thing I tell people to do is just do a daily check-in. You need to know – are you feeling red, yellow, or green? You want to be green a lot of days, but it’s okay to be yellow, it’s even okay to be red. So red would be super stressed, you’re having a terrible day, and that’s normal. We need to understand that bad
days are going to happen and stress is going to happen, and we are meant as humans to be equipped to deal with that. But when it starts to become chronic, which would be you’re seeing you’re feeling red every day of the week, that’s when you need to start taking notice and saying, okay, what is it that’s going on here? Is it something at work, or is it something personal?
Start to dig in to make a change, so that it doesn’t lead to a mental health disease.
Tatiana: What employers can do to help people understand themselves?
Georgia: From a company standpoint it is having both proactive and reactive resources in place. We focus on a more proactive route, where we’re doing virtual webinars to help educate people on what they could do to stay healthy and keep up with their mental health. The reactive part would be if something traumatic happens in your life or you burn out. Here you can use your employee assistance program and seek out more professional help.
Employers need to lead by example. For instance, you can encourage employee breaks during the day, but make sure managers are also taking breaks and not emailing subordinates asking for responses after work hours. We need to encourage the management to lead by example because if your boss is taking a lunch break, you’re going to be more inclined to think it’s okay to take a lunch break.
It’s a normal part of what we have stress during a job, but if we feel overstressed it leads to burnout. It happens when people are overloaded and have, negative inputs from people in the company. Let’s say that you’re working 12 hours a day and your boss is not even acknowledging the work you’re doing, that can lead to burnout, not necessarily the fact you’re working 12 hours, but the fact that that work is not being recognized. Even though they’re working traditional hours, they feel like they have no purpose at the company, they don’t know how their work is impacting the bigger picture – that also could lead to burnout.
Knowing how the work that they’re doing is affecting the organization on a bigger level, helps give them that fuel to put more into their work. And this comes down to the managers.
Tatiana: I think you know we book «Atomic Habits». What wellness «atomic habits» you should have for the company, for the safety and mental health of your employees, what wellness habits you have implemented as a manager, and what habits you could implement as a person?
Georgia: Starting with individuals. You can do the daily check-ins, meditation can affect our brain and affect our mood and impact how we deal with stress when it happens. It builds stress resilience, if you’re meditating every day, your brain will be better equipped to be able to handle stress. That could be a minute a day and then build up to five minutes a day. I recommend for people to do it first thing in the morning when they wake up or when they go to sleep at night because it can also help you fall asleep, and I recommend a guided meditation, because obviously if we’re sitting there, trying to just you know close our eyes and be silent, all the thoughts are going to be going through our heads, so I usually recommend an app like Headspace or Calm that can do a guided meditation.
I also recommend to take a break, get outside, get some sunlight, get some fresh air. Sunlight to have all of our systems working properly, so a lot of times if people are spending all their days inside, it really can start to make a long-term impact on both their physical and their mental health.
From the managerial standpoint, I think the best thing you can do is be close to your team where you know what’s going on with them. Because the closer you are and the better relationships you have with your team you’ll start to notice that if their behavior changes. If someone’s starting to look different or sound different, that may be worth a deeper conversation, so really just pay attention to your employees, have those relationships, and then lead by example.
You can start a meeting as a manager with the question « How was your day – on a scale from 1 to 10?»ю Not «How are you?» because it’s just second nature to say «I am OK». So maybe we need to ask a different question. “How was your day – on a scale from 1 to 10?” gives you more depth. And managers can start the conversation with how they’re feeling as a manager. If a manager gets on a call and says “I’m having a tough day today, you know, my kids woke up late, the house was a mess, etc.” people start to feel that human connection and they think it’s okay and they’re in a safe space to share.
I would recommend that a manager just be human first and be relatable and make sure that they have close ties and connections with their team, not only on a group level but could you have more one-on-one conversations regularly with their team members.
On a company level, you need to make wellness a priority, because a lot of times when we have our health sessions online we do a survey after and ask the reasons why people don’t attend. The number one reason is actually because they had another meeting scheduled. So if you’re a company and you’re investing thousands of dollars or hundreds of dollars into your well-being program, lock the time in the company calendar to show that this is a priority and there aren’t to be any other meetings scheduled during this time. Building it into the culture by actually blocking that time off for doing those activities.
Another thing is just sharing the results, we give a lot of survey data after our programs, so share that with the team, saying, hey, everyone just did this nutrition challenge and 50% of people doubled the amount of vegetables they’re eating daily. It helps to attract more people for the next challenge and your program.
Tatiana: I want to discuss how to start a discussion about mental health in the company. Most people worry that they will have some problems, and look like unreliable people and it could be a risk for career perspective if they start to share their problems.
Georgia: It’s easy for me to say, just talk about it, but that’s not everybody’s culture. It would be very difficult for someone to talk about it who doesn’t want to open up, but I think the more that it’s being discussed over time, we will start to break that stigma around mental health. If a boss opens up about it and then someone else in the company, it will start to create a safe space the more we hear other people talking about it.
The statistics we’re seeing, one in every five adults will struggle with a mental health disorder, and that’s just what’s being reported, so it’s likely you know two or even three people. So if you think about your circle of coworkers or friends, chances are that someone is struggling with that, but they might be quiet about it.
We do a mental health workshop for example, and the first part of that workshop is just defining what mental health is, what’s a mental health disorder, what are the signs, and what that looks like, and then we get into how you can protect your mental health. We even look at substance abuse as something, that a lot of people had during COVID and might still have, and that is something that is classified as a mental health disorder, so I think it’s a lot more common than we all may realize, and the more we talk about it, the more we’re relatable to others and we give them that opening to also talk about it.
Someone may not be comfortable telling their manager, so companies need to make sure they know that there’s an employee assistance program in place or there’s a hotline that they can call if they want to speak to a therapist or a social worker.
We’re not qualified as a manager to advise in difficult situations, but we can listen. Make a safe space to share and then ask the follow-up question “How can I support you?”.
Tatiana: If we don’t have a lot of boundaries between our private life and our work life, especially in a situation of remote work and a hybrid world, what is your recommendation to the company on how to change the culture?
Georgia: It is not easy to change the culture and it’s something that does take time, so I would say — start step by step. Instead of just trying to change the company culture overnight, because people need to adjust to change in increments.
Have a long-term plan and then make the short-term goals. Maybe you shorten the company hours in the summer (on Fridays).
If your managers email you after work hours, you feel like you have to respond – so maybe they have to stop doing it. I love the idea of setting that boundary as a company where we’re not allowed to send emails after 6 pm or 5 pm. Mail freezes from the end of the work day until the next morning and you can use WhatsApp for discussion on an urgent topic. These small steps are very important.
Tatiana: What can you also recommend to companies who want to improve the mental health of their employees?
Georgia: Firstly, for companies is very important to know more about mental health. We have different formats that work for each company, so for example, I mentioned the mental health workshop, which would be a longer intensive program. We love to do journaling exercises because this is a way to be mindful and check in with how we’re feeling, and what we want our goals to be.
