As a people leader, balancing your own mental health and well-being is critical to being able to support the success of your employees and team.
We have resources to help with:
- Performance management that is effective and safe
- Identifying and addressing employee issues
- Team building
- Developing psychologically safe leader strategies
- Sharing resources with employees
We have free evidence-based resources to help you with all of this.
People leaders play a vital role in any organization because they must balance overseeing that the goals of the organizations are achieved, while also managing a team of individuals who help make reaching those goals possible. Evidence-based actions for leadership and expectations provides a comprehensive outline while we have highlighted some of the most popular resources below.
Performance management
People leaders can support the performance and success of an employee at work in a psychologically safe way, even when mental health is an issue. Recognize the important role you play in helping employees do the best they can with the resources and time available.
Performance management strategies can help you recognize the unique job-related needs of each employee. We help you focus on solutions that you co-create with your employees so they are more likely to commit to them in the long term. This approach can be successful whether the employee is dealing with a significant life stressor, living with a health issue, or struggling with a specific job task. Tools including Supporting task improvement, Workload reflection and discussion tool | PDF and Supporting employee success can all help.
When employees struggle with workload stress, it’s important to focus on alleviating the stress rather than just reducing the quantity of work. Employee workload stress provides you with many tools, templates and resources to help.
Identifying the signs and symptoms of burnout can also help you address and prevent the negative impact from workload stress.
Identifying and addressing employee issues
Many issues that can come up with an employee are addressed in our resources. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, contact us to ask what is available. Some of our topics for people leaders include:
- Accommodation planning
- Burnout response
- Communicating with emotional employees
- Conflict response
- Dementia response
- Employee workload stress
- Getting employee commitment
- Grief response
- Helping employees to manage change
- Identifying employee issues
- Impairment and addiction response
- Implicit bias
- Indigenous teachings
- Leader support for employees who are caregivers
- Leader support for newcomers
- Protecting the mental health of isolated workers
- Psychologically safe orientation strategies
- Responding to lying
- Retiree interview
- Return to work response
- Suicide response
- Supportive task improvement
- Violence response
Employee mental health issues
If one of your employees is struggling with symptoms of a mental health issue, we can help you build an accommodation plan to support their well-being and success at work. Employee mental health issues can help you to:
- Identify and communicate with employees who may be struggling
- Build an accommodation plan that addresses cognitive, behavioural and physical limitations
- Support the employee when they return to work
- Manage co-worker reactions to accommodation
Helping employees to manage change
Change of any kind can be a common stressor for employees. Helping employees to manage change helps you to protect the psychological health and safety of your team members even when the change is uncertain, unwelcome or creating anxiety.
Team building
Psychologically Safe Team Assessment
It’s impossible for you to oversee every interaction your team members have with one another, clients, customers, or patients to make sure the experience is psychologically safe. However, it is important you are aware when issues occur because when team members don’t feel safe at work, it can affect:
- Productivity
- Problem-solving
- Relationship building
- Overall well-being
The Psychologically Safe Team Assessment is a free, 10-minute assessment that is shared with team members. The results will highlight both positive aspects of the team’s experience and areas that could benefit from improvement.
Team building activities
Holding space for your team to connect and learn from one another can foster team cohesion, where team members support one another and problem solve together. These Team building activities take about 15-30 minutes depending on the size of your team, and can be embedded into team meetings.
Orientation strategies
How we integrate new members into a team can have a substantial impact on everyone involved. Psychologically safe orientation strategies help with onboarding new team members in a way that supports their inclusion and success on the job. This can help you:
- Foster connection
- Clarify expectations
- Gather information about constructive feedback and recognition
- Understand the employee’s goals
- Support those whose position has changed substantially
Developing psychologically safe leader strategies
While all of our resources are developed to be psychologically safe, the following are specific tools and assessments designed to help you reflect on your own strategies.
Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment
Self-assessment provides us with an opportunity for reflection. Assessment by our employees can provide us with insight and perspective. Set yourself up for success with the Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment by evaluating yourself, viewing your results and committing to actions in areas that need improvement. After 6-8 months of applying those actions, have your team assess you so you can see where growth can continue to happen.
Subscribe to receive short weekly email tips
Being a people leader often means juggling many responsibilities and tasks. Your time is limited. If you want to stay motivated and inspired, subscribe to Bite-sized leadership strategies for short emails that cover topics like:
- Change
- Burnout
- Implicit bias
- Conflict resolution
- Emotional intelligence
- Performance management
- Employee mental health issues
Building trust for leaders
Teams where employees trust their leader can have higher productivity, employee retention, and engagement. In Building trust for leaders, you’ll understand what each competency looks like with a short video showing you how to utilize that competency.
Emotional intelligence for leaders
Many leaders are not taught emotional intelligence, but anyone can learn it. The way you communicate information can impact your team members’ well-being, as well as their respect towards you. Emotional intelligence for leaders shares strategies and activities to help you improve your:
- Self-awareness
- Listening skills
- Ability to provide constructive feedback
Sharing resources with employees
Workplace Strategies has many resources to support well-being for employees and their families. There are resources available to:
- Help employees address workplace issues. Find an array of approaches for conflict, bullying, accommodation and well-being.
- Help those who may be struggling with health or caregiver issues. We searched for credible and practical resources on a wide variety of health concerns.
- Support resilience, emotional intelligence and well-being. These free tools and approaches can help employees reduce stress and improve their mental health.
Referring employees to resources suggests tactful words to use when referring employees to resources for a variety of reasons. You can adapt these words for any resource.
Additional resources
Organizational strategies are for decision-makers who are responsible for policies, programs and prevention strategies or to support workplace mental health and psychological health and safety for all.
There are also many free assessments, tools and workshop materials that include slide presentations, facilitator guides and participant handouts.