Creating Whole-Company Resilience Through Emotional Health and Well-Being
IBM used the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst to create resiliency through a framework of policy, practices and perspectives.
Policy
Over the past several decades, employers have expanded their wellness initiatives to include broader aspects of well-being—like social connectedness and financial and mental health. Beyond helping to manage health care costs, employee well-being programs yield better workforce engagement and productivity with proven financial savings and performance-related benefits.
Concurrently, the way we work has shifted dramatically. Tools that support collaboration and communication also enable 24/7 accessibility. We have greater access to digital information, social media platforms and global, distributed talent. We enjoy more flexibility, the ability to work from anywhere, greater career mobility and the chance to be more creative, innovative and entrepreneurial. We may also suffer from an “always on” culture with little opportunity to power down. The boundaries between work and home can blur, and we must navigate constant pressure to keep up. Add external factors like economic uncertainty, climate change and global political instability, and a challenging picture emerges.
According to a 2017 national survey by the American Psychological Association, the workplace was reported as the third-leading cause of stress (61 percent), after money (62 percent) and the future of the nation (63 percent).
A 2019 study conducted by Mindshare Partners found that over 60 percent of respondents said that their productivity at work was affected by their mental health, and over a third thought their work or workplace environment contributed to their symptoms. Mental illness and substance abuse annually cost employers between USD 80 billion and 100 billion in indirect costs.
A New Workforce Imperative
From this mental health crisis, resilience has emerged as a new workforce imperative. Beyond providing services for physical and mental health conditions, we must foster an ability to bounce back from challenges so that innovation, collaboration and engagement can flourish.
All of this was true in recent years, but the global pandemic has made it no longer possible for employers to compartmentalize the mental health of their workers as an individual responsibility, rather than a corporate one, given the potential of this crisis to massively impact the health, well-being, performance and productivity of so many workers.
An IBM Master Inventor is also a master magician and has been doing magic shows in different time zones for IBMers and their families all over the world. He’s entertained over 1,000 so far. He is even doing custom birthday video messages for children who are celebrating their birthdays in quarantine.
Everyone is experiencing the pandemic in their own way and on their unique timeline. Some are dealing with illness or death in their immediate family. Some are on the front lines battling the disease. Some are essential workers. Some are suddenly at home, trying to work, homeschool, nurse sick relatives and live at the same time. Many are overwhelmed by relentless media coverage, conflicting epidemiological models and projections. All are impacted by uncertainty, grief and loss.
A recent study by IBM’s Institute for Business Value found that 1 in 4 employees surveyed cite mental health impacts while working from home during this crisis, and more than 40 percent of Americans surveyed feel strongly that their employer should provide access for employees to mental health and well-being assistance programs prior to opening up their workplace to return to normal operations. According to Dr. Randy Phelps, “Previous disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Asian tsunami revealed that those with pre-existing conditions will suffer worsening of their conditions, and rates of PTSD, depression, anxiety, substance abuse and domestic abuse will soar. Those of us in the mental health community fear that the morbidity and mortality rates globally for mental illness will far exceed those of the COVID-19 disease itself.”
In this context, the capacity of an organization to be resilient is a competitive imperative that will differentiate which companies survive the pandemic’s upheavals. Just as business leaders are reassessing supply chain stability, business continuity models and employee safety protocols, the ability of organizations to emotionally cope with trauma, uncertainty and threat, and their accompanying ability to bounce back, will determine how well we move from trauma to recovery to renewal. |
Our Journey to Resiliency at IBM
Resilience is the ability to handle challenges; bounce back smarter; and thrive in the face of changing demands, stressors and opportunities. It’s about our ability to reflect, relate, renew and realize our potential under pressure. At IBM, we are seeing three landscapes of action— policy, practices and perspectives—where increased focus might enable better emotional well-being, mental health and resilience outcomes.
It’s increasingly clear that individual solutions to resilience are necessary but insufficient. We need approaches that support organizational resilience. We need to master the whole stack—a leadership mindset to foster personal and team resilience; the skillset to build healthy, productive, engaging work environments; new practices to engage, support and enable people to thrive and flourish through crisis; and the broader company/social policy environment to extend these benefits beyond the individual.
“Unleash the creative power of your employees to explore what your organization could do. This is a perfect opportunity to crowd-source employees’ clever ideas for new ways to provide support for their communities. Having the chance to help others can be an antidote for some employees who themselves may be struggling with isolation,” said Michelle Peluso, CMO, in The CMO’s Guide for Turning Mayhem into Momentum.
At IBM, here is what we have done to fortify our foundation of institutional support, experimenting with new approaches and establishing a new standard for enterprise-wide well-being and resilience. Our lessons learned, and the guiding principles behind our efforts, can be simplified and applied within organizations of nearly any size or scale.
Policy
Bridging the gaps and deploying an employee-first benefits design. With the onset of COVID-19, our policy and benefits team made new investments to help employees through the crisis. We deployed employee assistance programs (EAPs) across the globe and expanded our offering to provide these free services to members of their households. In addition to mental health services, EAPs offer webinars and counseling on personal and family issues, dealing with difficult emotions, uncertainty, grief and loss.
We also expanded tele-behavioral health and pharmacy benefits. Early in the crisis, we saw significant challenges facing IBMers with school-aged children or family members needing care. For some, these additional responsibilities made it difficult to maintain a regular, full-time schedule, so we enhanced our part-time benefit option so people could continue to work while supporting their families.
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updated the intranet page around the clock.
Co-creating solutions. One of the most inspiring features of IBMers’ resilience during the pandemic was the outpouring of peer-to-peer support and solutions. Initially, when COVID-19 first impacted our colleagues in China, Slack channels appeared offering support and encouragement. These channels created a space where IBMers could help one another by sharing resources, messages of hope and insights. We learned so much from the experience of IBMers who went through social distancing first, which translated into better and more effective responses later. But these channels also provided a vehicle for altruism that is psychologically beneficial to both the giver and the receiver. We also studied the dialogue for the gaps—where did IBMers need more support and information? What are we currently focusing on that maybe we shouldn’t be? Could we put that energy elsewhere?
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this work is shifting our mindset about the role and responsibility for corporations in this highly personal area.
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