The age of ambiguity is taking its toll, but the pertinent question is what’s to be done about it. A string of high-profile mental health awareness campaigns have rolled out across the UK in recent years, but the sound bites have been slow to ingrain themselves into daily operations, particularly in the workplace. Throw the changes brought by this year’s pandemic into the mix and the result is a hefty deterioration in what was already far from an optimal situation.

The latest evidence of this is in a report out today from Aviva that explores the effect of increasingly blurred lines between professional and private time on wellbeing, work-life balance and the relationship between employers and their staff. Research carried out in February of this year was repeated after the outbreak of Covid in the UK to gauge the pandemic’s impact on work and society.

Entitled “Embracing the Age of Ambiguity”, the report finds that heightened anxiety has led to employees working longer hours and taking fewer sick days, all while becoming less fulfilled by work and private life.

The destructive ogre of “presenteeism” has not only survived the health crisis, but has thrived in a new mutation adapted from traditional office definitions. With work now firmly entrenched in many people’s homes, almost half say they never fully switch off from what used to be the “day job”. The number of people who have taken no sick days has increased by 17 percentage points to 84 per cent, and more than a third have carried on working when they felt unwell.

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The consequences of this are predictable, yet no less problematic: more than half of those surveyed agreed they are neglecting their physical (58%) and mental (55%) health due to the pressures of work. Furthermore, 43% said they are troubled by how much their work interferes with their personal life.

Like any medical ailment, early diagnosis and treatment improves outcomes in mental ill-health. The challenge is that despite all the high-level rhetoric, the reality on the ground in the majority of workplaces is that seeking help is still viewed as an admission that you “can’t cope”; kiss goodbye to the prospect of promotion or plum assignments, or in the worst cases, say cheerio to your job.

Much of this is down to a failure to lead by example. Another recent study by Bupa found that more than a third of business leaders in the UK have turned to alcohol or drugs to deal with mental distress during the pandemic, with the vast majority admitting they self-medicate because they can’t talk to anybody about their wellbeing concerns.

Across all board-level executives, 42% felt their reputation would be harmed if it was known they were struggling. Nearly as many, 39%, said they would not seek help if they needed it for fear it would impact their social or professional standing.

If those at the top of the pecking order feel constrained by the taboos around mental health, what chance for those further down the chain of command?

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A couple of years ago, a therapist based in Glasgow handling workplace referrals for anxiety and depression noted that he was seeing a substantial increase in patients suffering bullying by their supervisors. The reason for this, he mused, was that many middle managers were being promoted beyond their abilities. Under pressure from their bosses, and unable to cope with their own stress, these line managers transmit their angst on to those beneath them.

So rather like a virus, the infection of mental ill-health spreads. And as winter brings the perfect conditions for the coronavirus to flourish, the economic fall-out from the pandemic creates a situation where tackling a plague of poor mental health becomes an uphill battle in the freezing mire.

For those who haven’t already lost a job, the fear of unemployment drives an urge to shove aside work-related stress until it builds to the breaking point. Business owners and senior executives see the survival of their organisations as paramount to all other concerns, including the toll on their personal lives.

Prior to the pandemic, the majority of UK employers were failing to meet basic standards in supporting staff with mental health. Even though awareness of the problem was increasing, there remained a disconnect between employers’ intentions and perceptions, and what was actually happening in the workplace.

The exodus of office workers to their homes makes it more difficult for employers to support their staff, but it does not alleviate their responsibility to do so. The average person spends an estimated 90,000 hours of their life – about a third of the time covered by their professional career – working. Shifting the onus for managing workplace stress entirely onto individuals, government or the health service is not only unethical, but also unfeasible.

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Astute organisations are aware of this, of course, and are also familiar with the cost to businesses of mental ill-health at work. This is widely cited at £30 billion a year, split up roughly at 10% spent on replacing staff, 30% linked to sickness absence and 60% lost to reduced productivity.

But in times of difficulty, figures such as these often fail to impress. In that sense, mental health is something of a “luxury item” that many organisations only focus on when the business is otherwise performing well.

A further challenge is that many initiatives are driven by a reaction to events that have already taken place, such as a highly emotive individual case. This undermines the ability to take an objective view on how staff wellbeing impacts overall business performance. A more proactive approach should lead to problems being detected earlier, before snowballing into a major incident.

It is thought that as many as 10 million people in the UK will need some form of mental health assistance as a result of the pandemic, a quite staggering figure when you consider the strain that the patchwork of under-funded services in this sector were under before the outbreak of the virus. Against that backdrop, employers need to prepare – now more than ever – for what is coming their way.

One final note of caution: it would be naïve to believe that subduing the virus, along with a widespread return to working in the office, will automatically trigger a dramatic rise in mental wellbeing. Any positive repercussions will take time to work their way through, and a broad deterioration in mental health was already underway pre-pandemic. Much remains to be done, even after the setbacks of Covid-19 are overcome.