Video: Employee Wellness Conference: How to harness a resilient mindset in the workplace

“Would a company be willing to operate if a quarter of its infrastructure wasn’t working at its best?” asked Tom Gaynor, employee benefits director at MetLife, at the REBA Employee Wellness Conference 2016.

And yet many companies effectively do, he said. “We know that around 1 in 4 people are reported to be affected by some sort of mental health issue,” he said.

Watch the session ‘Harnessing a resilient mindset fit for the future workplace’, in full.

With the different stresses that employees face he said that employers have to help manage resilience to stress. “You could say that stress is the new normal,” he said, explaining that this was partly due to the always on culture of today’s global workplace.

“There are lots of things organisations can do to improve the resilience of individuals,” he said. This needs to start however with removing the stigma around mental health so that people feel more willing to talk about the stresses and pressure they are under.

He said companies also need to take a more sympathetic view to people being unable to cope with workloads and better manage that. “If they were overwhelmed then their resilience levels weren’t appropriate to what they were doing. Someone that can’t take on more and more work isn’t a failure,” he said.

He said employers need to look at changing their company culture and “create conditions that allow people to thrive”.

This video was filmed at the REBA Employee Wellness Conference 2016