Tackling The Epidemic Of Depression In Small Businesses
Depression is a dabilitating disease that can take it’s toll on even the strongest of people. In this article we look at how depression can affect you and your small business and how to tackle it in your workforce.
As an entrepreneur, you are going to feel different amounts of pressure on your life as a whole. While there are a lot of discussions nowadays about the work-life balance, there isn’t much in the way of mental health discussed through entrepreneurs and employees of startups. You see a lot of articles online about nurturing your employees, outsourcing parts of your business, and how to keep your business accounts in a good state, but all of this can have a detrimental impact on your state of mind. And if you’re feeling stressed, this stress and pressure, especially in a small startup environment, can transfer to your employees. So, why is this epidemic a concern, in a personal and professional sense, and what can you do to help everyone involved?
The Professional Impact
From your perspective, whether you are just starting out with a business, and you’ve managed to make steady progression and hired people, mental health and anxiety issues can have a detrimental impact on how you run a business. It’s important for you to take a step back from time to time, and assess if your judgment is compromised due to anxiety or depression. It’s easier for entrepreneurs to push forward and ignore these issues, mistakenly viewing the business as a bigger priority.
In actual fact, it’s much better for you to address your demons before they impact on your ability to cope. The pressure any entrepreneur can face, especially when it comes to businesses that have a lot of employees, they can feel that they’ve let their employees down. When feeling these pressures, it’s far better for you to take a step back. You might look at the business and see if it can function without you being there, which is the overriding goal. If you are feeling a lot of his precious, is it because you are holding too tightly on to the company?
The Personal Impact
The impacts, not just on yourself, but your employees, in a personal sense, can mean that anxiety causes a reticence to come into the office. It’s something a lot of people feel, but is this because of the working environment? If it is, taking positive steps to change the workplace culture is what will benefit you overall. A startup company, especially those that are in their infancy, can feel like a very precarious place of business. If there is no sense of stability, it’s hardly a surprise that employees are anxious.
This is something you can aim to fix. Promoting a positive workplace culture through various approaches, and ensuring that they have support networks will have a long-lasting positive impact on the company and people’s attitudes towards work. This can be done in many different ways, there are approaches that businesses implement, such as employee assistance programmes, and there are many different organizations that provide these, there are employee assistance programmes from Peninsula that can provide treatment like cognitive behavioral therapy.
The welfare of your employees is vital, but this is something we can overlook when we’ve got so many problems of our own. Instead of looking at it from your own perspective, and see what your needs are, think of yourself as part of the whole team.
How To Help Everyone
And by thinking of yourself as one part of a team, you shouldn’t treat yourself better or worse than anybody else. Helping everybody is the best way for you all to move together. Mental health problems are rife across every industry now, and we need to address our own specific attitudes towards dealing with these problems in the workplace. You can help by having an open door policy, which, when integrated into the workplace culture, will help everyone feel at ease.
The big problem that every industry has now is the dreaded T-word: targets. This appears to be the priority over everything, including human feeling. However, despite the fact that hitting targets generates profits, you need people to do the work. Healthy workers are happy workers, and happy workers are productive workers.
Mental health is something we shouldn’t shy away from in business, yet we still go by that maxim, it’s not personal, just business. This is an antiquated notion in the modern world, and if you are operating with that in mind, it’s hardly a surprise that mental health problems are on the increase in small businesses and entrepreneurs. Depression is an epidemic in small businesses, which is why we need to start tackling this from the inside out. So, look at helping yourself, but apply this same attitude towards the company culture. Your employees will thank you for it.