NICOLE KOBIE
Want to know how your employees or colleagues are feeling? Ask them, whether you’re working remotely or sat next to each other
Want to know how your employees or colleagues are feeling? Just ask them, whether you’re working remotely or sat next to each other.
The nationwide working-fromhome project has sparked some odd ideas: Zoom parties for socialising with colleagues, fake “commutes” to help separate work from home when both happen in the same place, and oodles of wellness gadgets and widgets that allow bosses to track how their workers are feeling.
The latest one to raise eyebrows is the Moodbeam, a wearable silicone wristband that connects to an app on the employee’s phone. When they feel happy, they tap a yellow button on the wristband; when they aren’t happy, they tap the blue one. That data is tabulated up and spat out into a dashboard for managers to watch over their staff’s mental wellness from afar.
This gadget raises a few questions. To start, why does it need to be a wristband when an app would surely suffice, especially since the wearable connects to a phone anyway? Why does it only have two buttons? Mental wellness goes far beyond happy or not, after all. (Ask me how I’m feeling at any point in the working day and it’s likely to be a “meh” that falls between both buttons.) And is it possible for people to give meaningful consent to share such personal information when the request is coming from your employer at a time of mass unemployment?
Set aside those concerns and there’s one more question that managers should ask themselves: why are businesses still so keen on using technology to solve people problems?
If you’re a manager, it makes sense to automate your invoices and use a bot for basic customer queries, but, please, take the time to ask your staff how they’re doing. Have a regular call, over the phone or Zoom, and talk to them. Put the effort into building up a trusting relationship and a space where they feel safe to admit they’re not at their best. Encourage your staff to chat to each other, be it over Slack or social Zoom coffee meetups, so they can help one another if they don’t feel comfortable confiding in their boss.
Is this harder than a wearable with a binary emotional button? Yes, but unlike Moodbeam, this may help someone someday. Such a wearable is an easy way for a boss to tick a box that they’re offering mental health support when they’re doing nothing of the sort – and it’s just as easy for employees to ignore their own issues and tap the “happy” button to keep their boss from prying. Indeed, while managers should ask after their staff, especially in these odd times, they shouldn’t expect or demand an honest answer. Supporting employees is part of a manager’s job, but tracking their mental wellness isn’t.
The whole idea of checking up on workers’ feelings is troublesome. After all, their boss may be the problem, or an employee may not want to discuss what’s distracting them because it has nothing to do with their professional lives. It’s a difficult challenge, but there’s an easy enough solution: cut everyone a bit of slack. We’ve all got a lot weighing on us right now, and the space to breathe and the space to chat are both helpful – and neither has anything to do with a wearable with a “happy” button.
In fairness, the sudden attention put on mental health at the workplace is positive progress, though it comes with the suggestion that working from home is the cause of the strain. Indeed, a BBC story about Moodbeam quoted a survey from mental health charity Mind showing that 60% of adult Brits thought their mental health had worsened during lockdown. However, the research wasn’t about working from home, but pandemic anxiety and lockdown boredom.
There certainly are specific challenges emerging from working from home over the past year, be those the added stress of home schooling for parents or loneliness for those on their own. But parents were exhausted and stressed before the pandemic, and the idea of a “loneliness epidemic” was discussed before lockdown. The pandemic has exacerbated existing issues, but it didn’t create them.
And this is the problem: workplace wellness shouldn’t be seen as a working-from-home trend. As someone who chose to ditch the office life six years ago, let me offer a bit of insight to managers: people can be miserable in the office too.
Consequently, anything that companies do now in the name of workplace wellness must continue into the office when employees return. People are just as likely to be depressed, frustrated and otherwise struggling in a building in the centre of town after a long commute as they are in their own homes, whether or not they’ve pushed the yellow button on a cheap silicone bracelet.
While managers should ask after their staff, especially in these odd times, they shouldn’t expect or demand an honest answer
Anything that companies do now in the name of workplace wellness must continue into the office when employees return