Healthy employees (both mentally and physically) are more motivated, productive, and produce better results - so healthy employees are one of the best assets a company can have. However, a lot of companies will only focus on physical health, but why is mental health any less important? In this blog post I will be talking about why mental health matters and answering the question "can HR create good mental health?" - enjoy!

When we think about HR, we often think about recruiting, company policy and grievances, but HR has become so much more than that. It is a great benefit to every company, by looking out for employees and providing benefits for them such as health screenings, you can keep them happy and motivated. Well-being has an effect on how your employees will work, so consideration of employee well-being will produce better results for your company - definitely worth the investment.

So, can HR create good mental health? This will depend on how each and every company attempts to create good mental health, and here are some ideas...

Firstly, keep in mind that well-being at work includes several areas of health and wellbeing, including:

• Work
• Health
• Values
• Social growth
• Personal growth

By making sure that your company policies are in line with benefitting these areas of employee well-being, you can begin to promote good mental and general health within the workplace.

Tackling some of the factors that affect mental health is a good next step for creating better workplace well-being. Some of these factors include:

• Long shifts
• Working overtime/extra hours
• Demanding managers
• Lack of training
• Miscommunication
• Undefined values
• Work pressure
• Unattractive salaries and lack of benefits

When employees are facing a mixture of these factors, they will create stress, which can often trigger anxiety and/or depression - mental health problems.

Understanding and acceptance is step one: Your solution starts when HR start to understand the importance of mental health and that it can affect anyone, at anytime, anywhere - someone could be working in their dream job, living in their dream house, living their dream life and could still be affected by mental health problems.

Training is step two: This understanding can be developed and supported through training - while HR staff don't need to be mental health experts, a real plan of how to support those who are suffering makes their job much easier. Courses such as the NEBOSH Health & Well-being Certificate are a great option.

Employee work/life balance is step three: Company culture is important in creating good mental health in the workplace. If your employees have an unhealthy work/life balance, where they can't switch off from their work problems at home (or vice versa), then this will impact negatively on them. Even small things like encouraging employees to eat away from their desks at lunch can reduce tension and create a better balance.

Hopefully these tips have answered the question "can HR create good mental health?" and you've got an idea of how to improve employee well-being within your own workplace. If you'd like to read more posts around recruitment and HR, check out our blog: http://blog.crunchposter.co.uk/