Companies Boost Days Off to Help Employees Manage Stress
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Here's your money briefing for Thursday, April 20th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. Many companies are taking extra steps to address their employees' mental health, a move they hope will help workers manage their stress and reduce employee turnover.
There's a growing body of evidence that shows that people who are suffering from burnout, anxiety, they're going to quit at higher rates. They're not going to be completely engaged with work. And so if employers want to get their best work out of people, they're going to have to understand that mental health impacts the way that you work on a daily basis.
We'll talk to Wall Street Journal contributor Tara Weiss after the break.
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To address their employees' mental health, some companies are offering workers additional days off, and in some cases, giving the entire staff days off. We're joined by Wall Street Journal contributor Tara Weiss. So Tara, dealing with mental health in the workplace, it isn't something new.
Anyone who's been a working person knows that this is not a new thing. Dealing with the outside world can obviously impact you on your day-to-day basis.
What mental-health steps are companies taking to reduce employee stress and turnover?
you don't turn off your personal life when you log on to your computer but i do think that the difference here is that employers are acknowledging it and so we really started seeing these policies come into place i'd say in about 2020 after george floyd was murdered by a minneapolis police officer as a result employers started to think about how they could help and support these employees whether it was offering mental health trauma counseling on company time and on the company dime. And from there, they realized that they didn't want to prescribe how somebody has to deal with these stressful events that are happening. And so they decided to allow employees to figure out how they wanted to deal with this on their own.
And that's when we started seeing these paid days off in addition to sick days and personal days.
So Tara, you alluded to steps companies are taking to revamp their time off policies. What are they doing there to address workers' mental health?
Some are offering extra personal days to do whatever they want to do and recharge however they see fit. Others are offering paid time off to do volunteer work. And then some companies are sort of relegating a day off each quarter the whole company shuts down so that everyone at the company doesn't feel the pressure to respond to an email or to get some work done despite the fact that it's a designated day off. One reason they're doing this is because they don't want employees to worry that they'll come back to an even bigger pile of work.
Okay, but at many companies, it just is impossible to give the whole staff a day off, and definitely not on short notice. So how are companies addressing mental health and burnout, but short of giving the whole staff a day off?
Sure, so companies are designing respite rooms.
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