Mental Health at Work: Our Best Posts of 2022

Having a Bad Day at Work? Use Our 8 Strategies to Turn Your Day Around

Having a bad day at work happens to all of us. Some days, things just don’t click. We got into a silly, meaningless bickering match with our kids or our spouse. The coffee tastes bad and won’t do the trick. The car won’t start. We can’t get our heads around a certain assignment. Whatever’s causing your bad day, when you’re in it, it feels like it will never end. The world seems like a dark, dismal place, and all you want to do is drown your sorrows and go to bed. 

But although it doesn’t seem like it when you’re in it, a bad day is just a day. If you’re wondering how to get through a bad day at work, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll share eight helpful strategies that will help you turn a bad day around. 

Combating Microaggressions at Work: Examples and Sensitivity Training Options

Any level of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or ageism cannot be tolerated in a workplace. It’s a business’s responsibility to ensure all of its employees, customers, and clients feel welcome, safe, and respected. This post will dig into a complicated and sensitive topic, but a topic that’s vitally important to discuss. We’ll go over what microaggressions are, provide microaggression examples, and share sensitivity training options that will help in addressing microaggressions in the workplace. 

How to Have Empathy at Work and Why It’s a Skill Worth Fostering

Even the most withdrawn and mysterious among us want to be understood. Showing empathy to your team members, managers, customers, community members, and stakeholders makes them feel seen and heard. Instead of chewing out an employee in front of everyone because they’re late, a manager with high empathy might choose to speak with the employee privately and ask them how they’re feeling. Do they have too much on their plate right now between their professional and personal life? Is there anything you can do to help?

Responding with empathy allows you to see things from someone else's perspective and feel their feelings as if they were your own. Empathy is a vital skill to cultivate in and out of the workplace since not understanding where people are coming from can lead to misunderstandings, conflict, and discrimination. In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of empathy in the workplace as well as how you can encourage and foster empathy at work.

Psychological Safety in the Workplace: What It Is and How to Achieve It

Does your team feel safe at work? Do they feel welcome to make suggestions and ask questions? Does each of your coworkers feel comfortable making mistakes without fear of their manager or fellow team members mocking or ridiculing them? If not, it’s a clear sign that your business needs to focus on improving psychological safety in the workplace.

In this post, we’ll break down what psychological safety is and why it’s important, including how you can ensure the psychological safety of your team.

How to Get Role Clarity at Work (Advice for Employees and Managers)

Do you have role clarity? Do you know what’s expected of you day-to-day at work? As an employee, not understanding what you’re responsible for is stressful. If you don’t understand your role, then you have no idea how your contributions benefit the company. It’s not motivating to feel like what you do every day doesn’t matter. Over time, it will become easier and easier to shrug things off, and you’ll be left disengaged, apathetic, bored, and wondering what other careers could be out there.

So let's stop right there and talk about role clarity and why exactly it is so important. This post is for both managers and employees. We’ll cover the importance of role clarity, how to ask for role clarity, when to ask, who to ask, and how managers can provide crystal clear role clarity upfront.

Signs of Self-Sabotage and How to Stop This Destructive Behavior

Instead of working on an important assignment, you procrastinate. Instead of making a career switch, you continue working at a job you despise. Instead of accepting help from friends and family who care about you, you push them away. Sound familiar? These can all be signs of self-sabotage.

The causes of self-sabotage vary. It can happen for a wide variety of reasons, and acts of self-sabotage can occur both consciously or subconsciously. But what exactly is self-sabotage, and what is self-sabotaging behavior? In this post, we’ll break down the signs of self-sabotage, why you might be engaging in self-sabotaging behavior, and how you can stop the self-sabotage that’s holding you back.

Autonomy in the Workplace: Why It’s Important and How to Get More

Autonomy is sometimes called liberty, freedom, or independence. At its core, it means that we can choose what is best for ourselves rather than have our choice dictated by something or someone else, and the desire for this kind of autonomy in the workplace continues to be a growing trend.  

Managers and business owners have learned, during the pandemic and beyond, that the level of workplace autonomy given to their employees has serious consequences for the success of their organizations. In this post, we’ll break down why workplace autonomy is so important, what the benefits are for employees and workplaces, and how to build healthy, autonomous relationships between managers and employees. 

Socially Inept: Overcoming Social Awkwardness at Work

We all feel socially inept and awkward at work from time to time. That’s just part of life. We’ve all gotten a coworker’s name wrong before, showed up late, broken a glass, or been reprimanded by a manager in front of others. Even though awkwardness happens to everyone, overcoming social awkwardness is still quite a challenge for many of us. 

In this post, we'll cover why social awkwardness occurs, the consequences of social awkwardness in the workplace, how to overcome social awkwardness if you're struggling with it, and how to mitigate its affects.