This week marks Mental Health Awareness Week and the focus for 2023 is anxiety and providing information to help support those experiencing it.
One of the biggest areas in our lives which might cause anxiety and stress is our jobs, and if you're concerned your workplace could be making you unwell, you might be right.
This is according to Sir Cary Cooper, a professor of organisational psychology from the University of Manchester, who spoke to The Mirror about mental well-being at work, and some of the various ways your workplace can make you ill from stress.
The expert, who is chair of The National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work, began by explaining that the space in which you work can have a big impact on you, claiming that the work environment should be a 'fun' and 'positive' space as we spend more of our waking hours there than we do at home.
However, this, unfortunately, isn't the case in many offices which feature rows upon rows of soulless desks and computers.
"It's terrible," the professor proclaimed, before continuing to explain that this kind of environment doesn't encourage people to work together in a positive way.
Instead, he says workspaces should be redesigned to be more fun, using biophilic design to bring nature inside by adding lots of plants, perhaps some water features, and adding a dedicated chill space for employees to use.
"You can create a fun work environment, we spend more of our waking hours in our workplace than we do at home, so why shouldn't we create a nice work environment and part of that is bringing nature in but also it's about getting people to talk to one another. Having free coffee times where people can have a coffee and a doughnut and just chill out with one another, making sure people go out to have lunch instead of just grabbing a sandwich and bringing it back to their desk to eat in front of a screen."
He adds that if there's nothing in the work environment to help people relax, the employees are likely going to feel stressed whenever they're in that space, which isn't healthy.
Another big contributor to workplace stress is emails - and the pressure to send them out of working hours.
The expert urges people to only work during their regular hours and not to send any emails at night, or else find themselves working long hours.
"Emails are the second biggest issue for stress and mental health in the workplace," he said. "My National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work found that emails were actually damaging people's health. There's a lot of evidence for this now in the research field called technostress.
"There's also a lot of evidence that working long hours causes ill health.
"There's a link between working long hours and being anxious or depressed and between that and your job satisfaction levels."
With all of that in mind, he shared some dos and don'ts of sending work emails, to try and help people manage their stress.
"The first rule is don't send emails out of office hours to people unless absolutely necessary. Obviously there may be things that are time sensitive, but if you can try to stick to 9-5 and not at night and not on weekends.
"The second rule is don't copy the whole world into your email, don't CC in everyone to cover your backside.
"That's what so many people do, they send it to X, Y and Z to make sure that everybody knows this, but that means other people are getting all of these messages all the time about things they don't really need to know."
Other tips include not sending an email to someone on a Friday afternoon if it's something that can be sent on Monday, as a person is likely to deal with it their and then and also to ensure yo pop an out of office message on your work emails when you aren't working at weekends, as well as holidays.
"If you adhere to [these rules], it means other people won't do this to you as well," he claims.
The psychologist added that the most significant way in which your job could be making you unwell is through your manager's behaviour.
"There are lots of things that cause people to get ill at work and be less productive and one of those is your line manager or boss," Professor Cooper said.
"Managers are the most significant people in the workplace in terms of your job satisfaction, productivity, and health but if you think about a manager in a workplace, most people are promoted to this sort of role or recruited for it based on their technical skills and not their people skills.
"But it's people who don't have good social skills that create stress for others as they don't have the emotional intelligence to recognise when people's workloads are unmanageable or they have unrealistic deadlines."
He went on to claim that if something was done about this then "we wouldn't have as many stress-related problems".
"My National Forum recognised that managers can be a bit of a problem and if we had people in managerial roles who had good emotional quotient, we wouldn't have as many stress-related problems and we would get higher productivity as a country," he continued.
"When promoting people in the future there should be parity between their people skills and technical skills, as for an individual if they have a bullying, controlling boss it's a critical issue, it'll make them ill."
The expert warned those who are facing this struggle to ask themselves two key questions to decide whether or not it's time for them to leave their job and get a new one.
The first is, whether or not your boss is changeable.
He says: "You ask yourself this question and consider whether you can give them feedback at an appropriate time, what the impact of this feedback will be, and what their behaviour will be like towards you after you give this feedback.
"Will he or she change? If the answer to that is no, then the second question is where should I go to work?
"Should I go to another department in this organisation or do I get a job elsewhere? If they are not changeable look for another job.
"A bad boss is a killer, they will make you ill and they can damage your outside life with your family, kids, and other relationships because you're so worried about your boss all the time. You don't need that."
If you thought your boss was changeable then you need to do something about it as soon as possible.
Start by picking a time at work when your boss isn't stressed out and ask if you can have a chat, ideally, this would be after "something positive" had happened for your manager.
"Use that time and be specific about what your boss does that upsets you," urges Professor Cooper.
"Don't be accusatory but give constructive feedback to your boss, because they can't change if they don't know you're unhappy with the way you're being managed."
The expert adds that if you do have a conversation like this and your boss doesn't change then you should leave for your own well-being.
"This relationship between you and your boss is so fundamental in the workplace as that person can make you feel good about your performance and motivate you or make you feel lousy and undermine your self-confidence.
"The evidence is clear on bullying at work, it really does damage people."
If you're struggling with mental health and are in need of support or want to learn more about Mental Health Awareness Week visit mentalhealth.org.uk/
