Day-to-Day Team Mental Health Tactics (Part 2)

 

You have team management routines already established in your project or agile effort. Use these to make sure you are properly managing the mental health of your team. Meetings can be a useful way to identify potential mental health problems and start to deal with them.

Periodic Team Meetings

Where you work mental health may not be a common topic. With the preparation you make as described in Part 1, though, it can be an unsurprising topic in your team meetings. Here's how to include mental health topics in these meetings.

• Proactively remind team members to take time for self-care. This helps them with building the habit of taking necessary breaks and using resources that your organization provides.
• Provide other helpful reminders or tips based on your research described in Part 1.
• Ask mental health related questions. Use informal terms and phrases such as "We are coming up to a stressful point in our execution" or "Well that was a surprising turn of events. What do you think about that extra work involved?".
• Follow-up on the initial responses to your questions and get input from everyone who is willing to share in the meeting. Look for anyone who is struggling and consider a separate follow-up meeting to investigate further. See below for more.
• If your questions uncover significant stress or anxiety in the team as a whole, ask the team what the best way to respond is. They do not have to know immediately. Also bring up any relevant information or resources your organization provides. If your organization does not provide relevant resources, communicate your researched expert resources.

Individual Meetings

You may have a routine individual meeting with team members. Do not hesitate to use these sessions to identify and address mental health problems. Without the whole team listening, an individual may be more forthcoming.

• Keep the meeting agenda but look for discussion points that enable you identify potential difficulties.
• Ask how the teammate is feeling in such a way that circumvents knee jerk responses like "I'm fine" or "doing good". To do this, ask about a specific experience. For example, "How did it go with the review?" Or "What did you have to do to meet the deadline?" These will bring about more useful responses so you can determine what the individual's experience has been and how they are reacting to it.
• If you do uncover situations where a team member admits to overwork, anxiety, potential burnout, conflicts in work/life balance or similar mental health struggles, be supportive. Use empathetic language that you have prepared previously. Create phrasing for your supportive and empathetic comments beforehand so that they sound like they come from you naturally.
• Refer the team member to the best resources.

 Ad Hoc Incidences

Ad hoc meetings where you speak with someone specifically about immediate mental health challenges they are having at home or work are a good place for an intervention if you are prepared as described in Part 1.

• If, for example, your organization has a phone number to call for those who are struggling, then your effective intervention will likely be to empathize with the team member and then advise them to call the number right away.
• Determine if you can make other immediate adjustments to allow the individual to get past this difficulty. For example, you may be able to increase flexibility for to complete work, provide a day off to deal with a family situation, and so on.

 Again, you are not a therapist. Leave diagnosing and treatment to the experts. Your role only involves the early identification and advice to follow existing resources provided for this purpose. Don’t go too far, yet be confident in your role by building your expertise and preparing your phrasing. See this work as an advanced extension of your leadership skills, because it most certainly is.

But, if you create a working environment where mental health and stressors are regularly discussed, identified, and dealt with, the team will be happier and more productive in a sustainable way. Even if it is rare to identify a team or individual mental health difficulty, the fact that you have created an environment that makes the discussions routine will set you apart as an effective leader and improve the long-term performance of your team.