Leading with Well-Being: How Leaders Create a Healthier Workplace

Learn how leaders can foster a healthier workplace by prioritizing employee well-being to drive both employee and organizational success; understanding well-being and mental health; recognizing the impact of an unbalanced workplace on employee well-being; and implementing effective best practices to improve culture.

When leaders and managers are proactive, engaged, and open-minded, and lead with a healthy mindset, they can create an environment where employees and organizations thrive.

HSI’s leadership, soft skills, and well-being training equips leaders and employees to strengthen culture and create healthier workplaces.

It starts in your head: creativity, ingenuity, drive, and engagement fuel thriving teams and businesses, but stress, self-doubt, depression, anxiety, and isolation can threaten well-being. Leaders must make employee well-being a priority.

With positivity, effective change management strategies, and a proactive approach to supporting mental health during both typical and challenging times, we can create workplaces where employees flourish, and organizational success is achieved. As employee engagement grows, employees experience a stronger sense of purpose and job satisfaction.

Understanding Well-Being and Mental Health

Well-being is marked by positive feelings and the ability to function well. It means being comfortable, healthy, and happy.

Mental health is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a state of well-being in which an individual realizes their own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, and is capable of being a contributing member of their community. Mental health is determined by a range of socioeconomic, environmental, and biological factors.

With depression as the leading cause of disability and a global crisis threatening to cost businesses trillions of dollars in losses by 2030, mental health and well-being in the workplace are too important to ignore.

As leaders, we need to watch for the signs of declining mental health and well-being in ourselves and our team members. Look out for increased anger and irritability, frequent physical complaints, persistent sadness, escalating anxiety, recklessness, and lack of healthy behaviors or typical levels of productivity.

The Profound Impact of an Unbalanced Workplace on Employee Well-Being

It’s tempting to dismiss changes in your or your team’s moods as temporary slumps. We all need a vacation from time to time! However, employee well-being and mental health go beyond a string of bad days. With half our time spent at work, a healthy work environment greatly affects our mental health.

Workplace stress includes heavy workloads, a perceived lack of recognition or impact, issues of exclusion, and conflicting work- and home-life demands. In a National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) 2024 poll, 37 percent of respondents reported feeling so overwhelmed that they had difficulty doing their jobs.

Employee well-being directly affects organizational culture and performance. Impaired well-being increases healthcare costs, absenteeism, and lower employee retention rates. The good news is that given the workplace’s crucial role in mental health, workplaces can be powerful sources of support.

Best Practices for Improving Employee Well-Being and Mental Health Workplace Culture

A healthy workplace culture relies on proactive, engaged, and open-minded, leaders and managers who enable themselves, their teams, and organizations to prosper. All it takes is intention, information, a plan, and follow-through.

Mind the Soft Skills

Soft skills—open communication, active listening, empathy, resilience, emotional intelligence, and more—enable strong teams. Strengthening these skills within your leadership and management teams should be your first step toward creating a healthy work environment.

People want to feel seen, heard, and valued. Team members want validation and recognition that leaders and the company care.

Create an Action Plan

Leadership support involves playing an active role in creating a mentally healthy workplace. Caring matters, but without action, the concerns of both you and your team members will remain unresolved. Get started on the right path by creating an action plan for your entire organization:

1. Assess your employees’ baseline well-being. Effective leaders notice the attitudes, behaviors, and output changes of their team members. These are often the first signs someone needs help.
2. Schedule regular check-ins. Meet with team members periodically to see if they’re in a temporary slump or need well-being support.
3. Clearly communicate mental health support and available resources. Provide clear, accessible mental health resources and workplace wellness programs, and integrate mental health into ongoing professional development training. This conveys leadership’s commitment to employee well-being while empowering them with tools to prioritize their own overall health.
4. Model healthy behaviors, like work-life balance and participation in workplace wellness programs. Lead by example when it comes to self-care, awareness, and open communication. Discussions of mental health and employee well-being shouldn’t be taboo, and if you lead the way with openness and honesty, your employees will be encouraged to do the same.

The 'Me' in Team

Remember, you can’t ask your team to improve their well-being if you neglect your own. Begin by accessing your own well-being:

• Healthy work-life balance: If you’re struggling to “switch off” at the end of the day, try adding end-of-day rituals to your routine to reinforce the line between work and home.
• Exercise and healthy eating: The mind and body are linked. Just as poor mental health can take a toll on your physical health, good physical health boosts your well-being. Cutting unhealthy snacks and adding exercise to your routine can give you a kick start toward wellness.
• Mindfulness and meditation: Meditating just ten minutes a day can improve mindfulness and reduce stress levels. Mindfulness expands perspective, helping you manage change and daily hurdles.
• Regular breaks: Especially when you’re feeling overwhelmed or behind, taking a break can seem impossible. But relaxation is a necessity. If you don’t take the time to slow down and step away from time to time, you’ll face burnout.

Leading the Way to a Healthy Workplace Culture

Once you’ve prioritized your own well-being, you’ll be ready to support your team members in doing the same. Here are several of the most effective ways:

• Practice open communication. It's the foundation of a healthy workplace, from leaders being open and vulnerable about mental health to sharing policies clearly. Foster a culture of psychological safety by encouraging team members to know they have a safe space to voice their needs and by promising to remain accessible for support.
• Facilitate access to resources. Pay attention, be an active listener, and direct your employees toward the help they need.
• Empower learning and conversations around mental well-being and self-care. Provide team members with accessible training content on the mental health benefits of supporting psychological and physical health. Bite-sized microlearning training courses offer consumable, actionable learning that sparks growth and dialogue on each topic.

HSI Can Help

A sense of purpose does wonders for the mental well-being of all employees. When team members have a sense of purpose and are fulfilled, organizations will see increased employee engagement and job satisfaction.

To create a productive work environment, leaders and managers need a leadership training program that focuses on critical soft skills, including open communication, active listening, empathy, resilience, and emotional intelligence. HSI offers a wide array of microlearning soft skills training topics. Take the first step toward creating a healthy work environment by requesting a consultation with us.

Also vital to creating a healthy work environment are solid employee workplace wellness programs. HSI can help educate employees on improving their well-being and productivity. Many of our clients open their HSI training library to their employees for self-directed learning. Employees can choose from off-the-shelf training video courses tailored to their unique needs.

We offer a host of training programs around health and mental well-being.

• Sleep
• Ergonomics
• Mental Health
• Healthy Eating
• Healthy Work-Life Balance
• Practicing Positivity
• Stress Management
• Supporting Parents and Caregivers

To learn more and start creating a supportive environment, request a consultation today!