CHRO
conversations
MENTAL WELLNESS
TOP OF MIND HR leaders are acutely aware of the potential impact of the national lockdown on mental wellness and come together to discuss their respective interventions during a CHRO Community Conversation.
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BY SUNGULA NKABINDE
ith already-existing cases of employers facing severe financial constraints to the point of struggling to pay employees’ salaries, South Africa’s HR leaders are discussing wellness and mental health in the context of a working population that is understandably feeling a little overwhelmed by the current level of uncertainty. Whether it is with regard to their health or job security, employees are anxious about the future. They are now also having to contend with working in this new working environment – their homes – which deliver a new variety of mental pressures and triggers. Executives are doing a number of things to not only take care of themselves but to also put measures in place to ensure the mental well-being of employees. Dimension Data’s chief HR executive Michaela Voller says they have indeed had concerns over how employees were coping emotionally due to the lockdown, “which drove us to start thinking about being more proactive about our approach to wellness, which is difficult to do because so much of the tools and systems that companies traditionally have in place are reactionary in nature.”
Engage, engage, engage To boost employee engagement, Michaela says that, at Dimension Data, they have created a social 40
networking app, which she describes as a corporate enterprise version of Facebook, through which employees can interact and participate in various wellness activities. Vodacom CHRO Matimba Mbungela says they are running pulse surveys, which go out to all employees and can be completed in less than five minutes. “We ask three or four simple questions…‘How are you feeling about the lockdown? What kinds of challenges are you dealing with? How can we improve your work-from-home experience?’…that kind of thing,” says Matimba. The pulse surveys have been a resounding success, achieving a 57 percent response rate the first time they were sent out to employees and 80 percent the second time. In fact, their success has led to Vodacom creating the ‘Take Your Chair Home’ campaign after a number of employees said the chairs they had at home were not comfortable to sit on for hours at a time. Vodacom employees are now able to fetch their chairs from the office and take them home.
Self-care Another thing that executives are focusing on is exercise. EOH HR director Malisha Awunor says the company has started online group exercise sessions, which take place at 6am and are led by one of the group executive team members. Malisha says she has also enlisted the ‘services’ of her daughter, who is now her self-appointed personal trainer and
