Ask Your HR: Year-end Fatigue – Navigating the cost of unaddressed mental health issues

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All right, 22 minutes past seven o'clock here in power business into our ask your eight hour segment. And as we approach the end of the year, many of us start, start feeling the weight of fatigue and exhaustion. That's not just physical, but mental and emotional too. Now your own fatigue is a real concern in many workplaces. And it's compounded by the growing crisis of unaddressed mental health issues, which are costing the South African economy billions each year.

Now, tonight on Ask Your HR, we'll be speaking to Dr. Frank Macquarie Faculty Member at the Gordon Institute of Business Science at Gibbs, who together with October Health recently launched the country's first evidence-based employee well-being index report, which signs the spotlight on the state of workplace well-being in South Africa. And to help us unpack this conversation, I'm joined again by Dr. Frank Macquarie.

Dr. Frank, a very good evening and welcome to Power Business. A very good evening to you. What a beautiful introduction and a very good evening to Power FM listeners. Thank you for putting this topic on the spotlight. Indeed, as we approach here and generally we do see vehicles or anyone really kayaks, the military, a lot of things, things that just weigh a little bit more on the mind than

you know, on physical health. And often people tend to also teach you know, you know, kind of stress and worry. And so for us, with our partner October Health, we thought it was important to elevate the discussion. And it's interesting that, you know, we are talking about it as this actual et cetera, you know, corner that he has on power essence.

And as you mentioned, you know, Dr. Frank, a really important conversation. And now South Africa has one of the world's highest rates of burnout and unaddressed mental health conditions in the workplace. Can you talk to us about, you know, some of the key reasons behind this? Yes, not people you quite like in that. I think in South Africa, of course, well, the idea of mental health not being understood well and therefore it doesn't get

as much attention as it should is a huge content. So when we talk about Dennard, what are we talking about? So we're talking about individual in the workplace who most likely has been going through some stress in the workplace. It could be financial stress, it could be bullying, it could be bitterness, enough finances, it could be, I don't have adequate resources, it could be job insecurity,

But the main presenting issue would be that stress was not addressed. It moved from just being a few sort of ones of stress into chronic stress. And therefore an individual find themselves tired, find themselves enjoying their job, find themselves eating sometimes doubting if they're even able to adequately handle the day-to-day tasks of their job.

And what makes it challenging and notable is that unlike a physical condition, when you're talking about something like burnouts or mental health in general, because it doesn't present itself particularly to a mannequin or another person to see that this person is not aware, it can be around for quite a while and it's not picked up and it's often quite lit. It has this condition.

As for these consequences, like you mentioned, that in the essay, we estimate that this is really a lower end of the estimate. That easily we're using 250 billion AA as a presentism, or if someone who has reported it to a manager and taking lead off, or if that's true, the fact that someone is at the work, but they're not well. They shouldn't really be there. The big problem, of course, is the problem, as you say.

So, in addition to that, if you ask me why particularly in South Africa, I think what we found in our research helps us understand a little bit better. If that in Asia particularly, there are some unique things about South Africa. One of them, we found in our study, is, for example, the continued

of I may be a victim of crime, for example. We know crime is at higher levels. That's one of the presenting problems. Often, money that would know it's there, but they wouldn't think it's a workplace problem. So people come out of our day-to-day society, and then they go into the workplace. So one of the presenting challenges is this idea that I'm concerned about my search from a crime perspective. Another one is finding,

where people and we've seen, even though interested in it, that it's coming down somewhat, that for a prolonged period, we almost have what I would have called in a way, the cost of living crisis. But you've got to start asking to pay their debt, to pay their rent, to kind of make ends need to pay for this in that way. So you combine all that. Certainly, you get to the people that you are painting of very high levels of

are there now in South Africa in particular? Yeah, definitely. And Dr. Frank, I wanted to know from you, could you highlight some of the key findings from the employee well-being index report regarding the state of employee well-being in South Africa? Quite a number of interesting points around why it really has to be one big ground. And so I can look to you guys.

Let's put a member. Often people would talk like, you know, the mental health is low or hasn't been well with my finances or the levels of stress are high in general. So we wanted employers to understand the extent of the problem as we highlighted it. And the second point was to say, let's give you some number so that you can look at your organization and compare it

national numbers, you can think about your industry. So, what are some of those numbers that we found most people? One, interesting, we found that in general, when we look at, for example, mental health, maybe to mention to you the areas of war being we look at, we look at mental wellbeing, we look at emotional wellbeing, which is how do you identify and manage your emotions, mental is managing stress and anxiety,

We looked at social well-being. How well do you engage with individuals in the workplace and also other people outside? What is your social network? When you need help, are you able to reach out to other people? We look naturally at financial well-being. The idea of being able to manage your finances well. And even work well-being. How well are you enjoying your work?

Are you finding it aligned to your purpose? Are you finding it as a satisfying career? So we have six dimensions around it. And all the other dimensions were generally high. We are talking of numbers in the 50s, for example, and what was outstanding was the following. If, for example, we look at out of 100, that's how we measured it,

we would get a score set at 67 for mental wellbeing. So that can, okay, score this room for improvement. If you look at physical wellbeing, we even look at that, we had a score of 66 out of 100. Let me just touch on emotional, then I'll go to the one that was low. 69 for emotional. If we look at all of the wellbeing, if you ask me, how are individuals across all these dimensions of wellbeing doing?

He scored, I guess, a healthy 65 out of 100. Again, there's room for improvement. He won, that was very concerning. And it's the context of SA over the last, in a few years, would explain it. It's 50 degrees, not people, only 50 degrees. You know, I'm thinking of when I was advising. We used to talk of Ema Dota score. You know, when it's just the next 50 percent for an exam. So it's 50 percent for financial, really minding employers.

that we're not finding the hard to pay debt. We have to not have emergency savings, for example. We have to find the need to have to put food on the table. So if you were to ask us as a gift, and October health, parents, if you have limited resources for an employee or an instructor, where would you start? Secondly, we would say, step X finances help employees, because we know finances have been split into as it improves.

emotional would also fit into mental issues, the lowest by far, only 50,000 of hundreds on financial wellbeing. And that really is a really startling information there, Dr. Frank. But unfortunately, we've run out of time. But this conversation, really an important one, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dr. Frank. Thank you for having us on the show. We'd rather thank you and be wonderful to you.

Fantastic. Dr. Frank McQuack were their faculty member at the Gordon Institute of Business Science.