Stress hits the bottom line – in more ways than you think
Corporates will pay a heavy price if they don’t understand the implications of mental health. Make well-being a priority for employees
There is this riddle among children. A ship is anchored in a harbour where the tide recedes one foot every hour. The ship’s ladder, which leads into the water, has rungs that are a foot apart. How many hours would it take for the water to drop three rungs of the ladder as the tide lowers? The intuitive answer would be three hours — but it’s wrong. When the tide recedes, the ship lowers with it and the rungs of the ladder remain same in relation to the water. If one were to use the ladder’s rungs as a benchmark, they would miss the fact that the ship has come down by several feet.
The pandemic has affected each of us to varying degrees. A year of isolation, unnatural and confinement, loss of social interaction, death of loved ones, loss of jobs, uncertainty about the future and several similar concerns are taking a heavy toll on each of us, but because the “ladder” remains where it is, most corporate leaders are unaware of the magnitude of the crisis facing their teams and organisations.
Mental health, specifically depression, was already a gargantuan crisis well before Covid-19. The World Health Organization had predicted depression to be largest global health burden by 2030 — ahead of heart diseases or cancer. They were wrong in their estimate by almost 10 years. Depression is now the leading medical burden of the world. By extension, it is also the leading cause of corporate inefficiency and yet remains unaddressed for several reasons.
First, mental health is a taboo in most societies and definitely pariah status in corporates, which idealises the strong, stoic leader. Stress, anxiety and depression are viewed as weaknesses and anyone professing them is more likely to be eased out of the organisation than to be helped out. Second, most leaders don’t understand the construct of mental health. The statistic that one in five Indians is undergoing some form of stress hides the fact that, this “one in five” is a round robin that affects each one of those five at some point, with varying degrees of damage.
Most importantly, while corporates use sophisticated tools for measuring physical presence and shallow work of their employees, they don’t meaningfully gauge their creative engagement or commitment to the organisation and colleagues. It is ironic that organisations, which schedule downtime for maintenance of their plant equipment to preserve their efficacy, believe that their personnel can continue to function effectively without any mental and emotional care. Consider these paradoxes.
Working from cramped, underresourced environment of their homes with little or no contact with teammates, for longer hours, without the relief of social friends and yet being expected to deliver the same quality of work as before, is an unrealistic ask — yet the norm among corporates. Several indicators of social stability such as divorce rates, broken relationships, suicides (especially among the young), financial distress, physical and emotional health are all plummeting alarmingly, and, yet, the expectation from the employees is that they will somehow become happy and positive after logging into the workplace. The expectation that an employee who indulged in road rage (another sign of social stress) on the way to work will become an empathetic team player when he enters the campus would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.
Each of us has a finite amount of physical and emotional reserves, which get whittled away with every instance that induces stress, whether caused by professional, personal or social anxieties. With the increase in work cadence, under frustrating conditions, this limited resource isn’t getting replenished at the rate of exhaustion. The mask, arguably the most powerful symbol of zeitgeist, is perhaps an apt one. Our faces are hidden, our voices are muffled and our breath is constrained. So, no one knows how we feel, our cries for help are unheard, and we are all waiting to exhale.
A large percentage of the employees are running on fumes. And corporates will pay a heavy price if they don’t see this clear and present danger.
A common refrain heard these days is “taking life day by day”. This innocuous statement conceals the ominous danger looming ahead. Taking life one day at a time might be good pop psychology advice, but it also indicates the loss of agency over a horizon. Imagine the implications to a corporate if their head of strategy, or any other strategic leader for that matter, chooses the mindset of living one day at a time. Or the implications for industries such as insurance, research, infrastructure projects or specialisation studies if the current or potential workforce start thinking in such temporal terms. Or the implication for policies such as climate. The financial damage potential of anxiety is huge.
This is an opportunity for corporates to accord the same importance to mental well-being, as they do for the physical safety, of their employees. Over recent decades, corporates have come a long way in terms of workplace safety because they realised the revenue and reputational costs. We need to create a similar environment when it comes to mental health. Focus on mental health is not some charitable feel-good initiative.
It must be done with a hard eye on the financial performance of companies. Laptops in place of desktops, smartphone allowances, flexible hours of working and work from home were all instituted for their financial returns than merely employee convenience.
Similarly, organisations must embark on rebuilding good mental health and morale through a programme as systematic and rigorous as it would for any of its organisational improvement initiatives. Otherwise, no matter how well they captained their ships during this period, it will be of little use if she has already run aground.
A LARGE PERCENTAGE OF THE EMPLOYEES ARE RUNNING ON FUMES. AND CORPORATES WILL PAY A HEAVY PRICE IF THEY DON’T SEE THIS CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
Training and government policies can subdue prejudices. But once encouraged, they become policies. And this is what is happening in India today, compromising law enforcement and compounding the fears of the Muslims — all this is pushing some of them to take extreme measures such as the reinvention of their identity.
A few lower-caste/class Muslims, who are second or third-generation converts, have started to revert to the identity of their Hindu forefathers, starting with a name change. One of them, Mohammed Islam (not his real name), who is engaged in the business of processing bovine hides for leather tanneries in Agra–kanpur, says, ‘My forefathers were Hindus. They converted because upper-caste Hindus did not treat them well. Islam offered both dignity and security. Now, if Islam does not give us the security, then we can become Hindus again. What will we do with dignity if we can’t stay alive?’
After having denounced idol worship for generations and holding the belief that there is only one God, Allah, can he prostrate before idols? And commit a grave sin, according to Islam?
Looking uncomfortable, Mohammed Islam looks around before answering. ‘It is not that I am not a devout Muslim. I am a Haji (one who has undertaken hajj to Mecca),’ he says, a bit indignantly. ‘My younger son is studying to be a hafiz. But security is also important. It is not just about my life alone, but my family too.’ After a pause, he adds, ‘It is about my business also. If I have a Hindu name, no one will bother that I work with cattle skin. But as a Muslim, I worry every moment.’ So, will he only change his name? Checking for the umpteenth time about what I was planning to do with this interview, and whether his name would appear anywhere, he finally stammers, ‘I am talking to some people that we want to return to Hinduism. We will go through the reconversion process and change our names. Magar dil mein kya hai yeh kisi ko kya pata (but how can anyone tell what is in our hearts)?’
For people like these, the stakes are very high. From being a daily wager in different tanneries, 20 years ago, Islam started his own business of skin-processing. Now he is a businessman, supplying to tanneries where he used to work earlier. As Professor Amitabh Kundu had noted in his post Sachar report (Report of the Post Sachar Evaluation Committee, 2014), the social mobility of urban Muslims largely pertains to people employed in small-scale industries starting their own enterprises taking advantage of the country’s economic growth, increased demand and easy bank loans.
My younger brother, who has inherited my father’s footwear export business, recalls the time when my father used to run the factory. The profile of the workers then was equally divided between Muslims and scheduled caste Hindus. ‘However, in the last two decades, the ratio has changed,’ he tells me. ‘Today, only 20 per cent of the labour is Muslim. The rest have started their own small factories, supplying to city-based exporters. These are the people who are threatened the most.’
While part of the threat comes from government policies, especially towards businesses that depend on cattle trading — ‘several factories have shut down in Agra in the last five years as they became economically unviable’, says my brother — the bigger threat is the vigilante mob, which now operates with impunity. The labour er s-turned entrepreneurs worry that their former fellow labourers may target them out of professional jealousy. Given the open prejudice displayed by law-enforcement agencies, especially in a state like Uttar Pradesh, small business people are looking at imaginative ways of keeping out of sight.
Not everyone is an activist or has the desire to bring about a revolution. Many people, across religions, prefer leading a regular life without being challenged either for their beliefs or lack of them. And so it is for a large number of Indian Muslims. While they are not unaffected by the Shaheen Bagh protests, they are worried about its impact on their lives and livelihood.
Atika Zakir says, ‘What the women of Shaheen Bagh are doing is really commendable. I hope it has positive consequences for the entire community. But I don’t see the point of aggressive assertion of identity. What good can come out of casting oneself in perpetual conflict with others?’ Atika takes pride in the fact that she hails from a family that embraced modern education three generations ago. Her great-grandfather used to bring out a newspaper called Medina back in the 1940s. A deeply religious family that has been as particular about observing the prayers and Ramzan fasting as about education and employment, Atika says that her family never felt the need to assert its identity.
‘I don’t wear a hijab. No one in my family ever did or does even today,’ she says. ‘I had to fight no battles at home to pursue a career. Finding a job after my education was a very natural thing to do. No eyebrows were raised...,’ she chuckles. Atika is part of the small Muslim middle class that has emerged over the last few decades. Her aspirations for herself and her family are similar to those of her peers, irrespective of religion...
This change in lifestyle has, in large part, been a consequence the embrace of modern education by a growing number of Muslims. As mentioned before, when I was in school, for several years, I was the only Muslim in my class. Today, in most public schools, it is common to find at least a couple or more Muslims in all classes. Ironically, this is one of the reasons that one hears about more cases of Muslim children suffering communal profiling in schools. The target group has increased...