As millions of Americans begin the process of returning to the workplace, mental health is at its nadir. But in Europe, where many companies have weathered several bouts of lockdowns and office returns, a blueprint of what to do—and not do—has slowly taken shape.
Returning workers in the U.S. and their employers face a host of unprecedented issues, including the unknown consequences of hybrid work schedules and the looming fear that the coronavirus threat will reappear in the form of a vaccine-eluding variant. Rather than play trial and error, U.S. organizations might peer across the pond and consider the continent’s failures and successes.
Belgium-based psychologist Elke Van Hoof, an expert on organizational stress and resilience, said she’s seen the smoothest back-to-office transitions among companies that were prioritizing psychological health before the pandemic. “If there was already a tradition of considering the best possible work conditions for employees, and reflecting on these issues, it facilitated easier responses to the unforeseen situations that the pandemic brought,” she said. Advertising firm executive Petra De Roos put it more bluntly: “If you have to start building a culture of supporting people during a pandemic, it’s too late.”
Many firms were ahead of the curve because the same European Union workplace regulations that require organizations to prioritize worker safety also address psychological welfare. Chief wellbeing officers are not uncommon, as are in-house teams trained in mental health or organizational psychology.
At LDV United, De Roos’s 50-person agency in Antwerp and a unit of WPP, the first point under “Our Culture” in the employee handbook reads “We want happy people.” A lot of that happiness seems to revolve around hybrid work arrangements involving both home and office.
“We built on the culture that we’ve established over 10-20 years,” said De Roos, LDV’s managing director. “The pandemic approach that we’ve used is a combination of ‘shots of happiness’ and ‘shots of helpfulness.’” The “shots” of happiness can be small gestures or gifts to help brittle employees decompress. Examples include flower deliveries to home offices, online gaming events and even warm messages saying “we miss you.”
“The real challenge is to see that people can help themselves. There’s only so much you can offer as a company.”
LDV’s “shots of helpfulness” include more robust efforts, including on-call mental health coaches, updated ergonomic seating for the home and visits from the IT manager. “If you have kids in online school and your internet goes berserk, you just call our IT manager and he comes over and he fixes your internet,” said De Roos.
To American ears, much of this may sound fanciful. And though some U.S. companies have helped workers navigate the pandemic by increasing mental health offerings, Van Hoof points out a key difference in workplace culture.
“A lot of companies have a great menu of programs,” the psychologist said of U.S. firms. “They have employee assistance programs, they have online training, they have [therapist] contact details. But the employee has to do something themselves in order to access those facilities, and they don’t that. Six out of eight employees won’t snoop around in such menus.”
And most psychological healing doesn’t come through programs—though they can be a path forward, she said.
“The real challenge is to see that people can help themselves. There’s only so much you can offer as a company,” said De Roos. She has arranged employee courses on resilience-building and a campaign to encourage learning something new every three weeks (an idea she attributes to Van Hoof). The theory is that new activities—going on a hike, learning how to knit or play guitar—can work wonders for depressed workers emerging from a year of trauma.