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Empathetic and authentic leadership in employee health, safety and wellbeing

Learn how empathetic and authentic leadership can improve employee mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, with tips on where to start and actions to take.
Empathetic authentic leadership
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By Sarah Phillips , 

Workforce Health Consultant, Mercer Marsh Benefits

04/04/2023 · 2-minute read

Empathetic and authentic leadership is a critical component to employee health, safety and wellbeing management, and increasingly, becoming part of people and culture strategies.

It is now even considered from a governance and legislative compliance perspective, with a number of states across Australia now mandating that organisations address psychosocial risks, with empathetic leadership a key consideration when looking at risks such as supervisor support, praise and recognition and workplace bullying.

The need for empathetic and authentic leadership has never been more important to address employee health and wellbeing, particularly the issue of employee mental health. In Mercer Marsh Benefit’s People Risk Report, Australia, mental health was ranked as the most likely people risk to occur in organisations in the next 3 years. It is easy to see why, when you consider the heightened stress and workforce fatigue and burn-out we saw off the back of the pandemic in 2021 and 2022, which is now being compounded by rising inflation and cost of living pressures for employees. Not to mention major concerns of a global scale, such as climate change and what that means for us and our future.

Addressing mental health needs to be a priority for organisations, by doing more than just providing a robust Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Organisations need to look deeper to address the root causes; but while mental health is a well-known risk for organisation, they often don’t know where, or how, to start to address the root cause of their risks.

A good place to start is to asses all levels of leadership and employees psychological safety to better understand the work environment and employee wellbeing: Are there unhealthy work hours being demanded, isolation, a blame culture, employees who lack control or even bullying? This can be done through various tiers of rigour, starting with internal anonymous surveys through to psychosocial risk assessments.

Another critical element to address employee wellbeing and support good mental health is to build trusting relationships, allowing all employees to feel confident to bring their whole selves to work. With the acceleration of AI in the workplace, this is one where the human factor cannot be ignored. This can only be achieved through authentic, empathetic leadership. Few leaders and managers innately possess these inherent skill set, it is the responsibility of the organisation to ensure this is demonstrated as a clear value and expectation of the organisations culture. To do this, organisations need to build empathy and authenticity as a capability in their leaders; providing formal training tailored to the various levels of leadership and management and their role in supporting this, is critical to ensuring the cascading messaging and behaviours are visible through all levels of the organisation. 

Other actions might include:

  • Embed behaviours and processes that support open communication and integrates demonstrable actions that show the employee voice is heard and listened to, such as providing frequent formal and informal feedback avenues.
  • Redefine the role of a leader to include capabilities or KPI’s that include empathy, so that the recruitment process and performance reviews for leaders takes this into account.
  • Teach employees the value of self-advocating and awareness so they can best contribute to healthy and productive feedback opportunities.

All of these steps should integrate the learnings from periodic assessments of workplace wellbeing, to evolve your organisation with your people and the demands and changes of our ever changing environment.

If you need assistance on where to start or are simply juggling to prioritise wellbeing with competing priorities, we are here to help. We, Mercer Marsh Benefits, can support you with surveys and data analysis, psychosocial risk assessments, or designing and delivering programs that suit your needs and maturity in this space to ensure your organisation is delivering on total wellbeing.

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