MHR , a provider of IT solutions for human resources management, recently published a study on the effects of the CoViD crisis on the well-being of employees. One figure made the headlines in the press specialising in social issues: 47% of employees fear that talking about their mental health at work could harm their career.
There is nothing trivial about the question asked : the health crisis and the accompanying economic crisis have objectively degraded the psychological well-being of workers. The statistics for anxious states jumped by 10 points between the beginning of 2020 and September 2021 ; those of sleep problems by 14 points over the same period (with 63% of adults who report sleeping poorly at the moment); those of suicidal thoughts by 5 points... There is also a surge in burnouts, with nearly 2 out of ten managers (18%) now saying they are at the end of their rope. In total, 20% of employees have experienced a work stoppage for psychological reasons since the beginning of the pandemic.
To explain this surge in psychosocial suffering, several factors are pointed out : the intrinsically anxiety-provoking nature of the presence of the disease in the daily lives of individuals ; isolation and the complexity of social ties such as over-proximity to the first family circle, a source of tension and conflict, even violence ; the transformation of professional practices with a demand for the appropriation of new tools at a cognitively unsustainable pace; the excess of demands correlated with the massification of teleworking ; concern about employment and career development prospects subject to the vagaries of the economic crisis...
In short, there is nothing fundamentally surprising in the fact that the mental health of workers is precarious due to the crisis we are going through. What is more challenging is the persistence of the taboo around mental ill-being in the work environment, even though the rapporteurs of the MHR study say that employers took this dimension of the crisis into account early on, by many of them putting in place support solutions for employees in difficulty : anonymous helplines, support units, emergency measures for situations of intra-family violence, modules to raise awareness of PSR in remote work, workshops for personal development and the preservation of physical and mental health (relaxation, meditation, yoga, etc.), etc.
It is as if the awareness of mental health issues among employers does not meet with the confidence of employees to share their difficulties and receive help via the work environment. What employees who keep quiet about their psychological suffering fear is not the time not to be understood and helped in an exceptional period like the current one, but the consequences of their current crack in the long term. In other words, the image that the company will keep of the person who did not hold out in 2020-2021. What is at stake here is not only the perception by the employer, who could unconsciously feed a certain mistrust of the " less strong " when there are challenging positions to be filled ; but also the image that the social body could permanently project on a person who has been confronted with difficulties likely to alter his confidence, his ability to concentrate, think and analyze, his availability and his modes of interaction...
We can bet that the increased consideration of mental health issues by the world of work will lead to a fundamental movement conducive to simplifying everyone's relationship to neurocognitive and psychological diversity as well as to the vagaries of existence that do not only result from somatic illness or known and socially accepted life events (conjugal unions – and disunions – parenthood, dependence on a loved one, etc.).
