Management must also focus on people's mental health
An increasingly worrying phenomenon around the world is mental health. Last year, a World Health Organization (WHO) study concluded that there were more than 1 billion people with mental disorders. And that in the first year of the pandemic alone, there was a 25% increase in anxiety and depression.
Brazil follows the trend. A current study by the Ipsos Institute, commissioned by the World Economic Forum, showed that 53% of Brazilians say their mental state has recently worsened somewhat or a lot, a percentage exceeded by only four countries in the world.
In companies, it is no different. The latest edition of the FIA Employee Experience (FEEx) survey showed that the group of people with excessive stress in companies grew by 4.4%. Out of every 10 individuals, 3 have a high level of stress. Burnout syndrome rose by 11.9%. And a series of “clues” show that CEOs and presidents are increasingly stressed, at levels higher than before.
Since all of this affects everyday work, causing losses for everyone, it should also be a management concern. In the lean system, there are a number of concepts and practices aimed precisely at this: reducing organizational stress and improving mental health.
For example, one of the most stressful factors is the lack of clear standards and processes, which forces people to “slay a dragon every day.” They try to do their best, sometimes improvising and creating risks, because they lack complete information or a view of the consequences of their decisions on the value stream as a whole.
By seeking to create simplified, standardized processes with a controlled pace and more predictable routines, the lean system goes a long way toward reducing the stress generated in day-to-day work.
Another important source of anxiety is the way problems are dealt with in organizations. If people shirk their responsibilities and start pointing fingers at one another, the environment will certainly be quite exhausting.
Lean management proposes a different view. In it, leaders and those they lead create together a new culture in which exposing problems is good and necessary. To solve them, it is necessary to work in a collective, collaborative and positive way, based on mutual respect.
The role of leaders is fundamental in creating a healthy work environment, or in ruining it for good. Command-and-control behaviors, for example, create pressures that often generate more tension than effective results. The lean leader, on the contrary, seeks to develop their teams so that they become increasingly proactive and master the methods needed to generate improvements every day, and take pride in it.
If all this is truly put into practice, fear, one of the greatest scourges in organizations, tends to be minimized. Individuals thus begin to grow stronger emotionally. What organizational psychologists call “psychological safety” is created. And this, of course, helps prevent harm to employees' mental health.
The book “Toyota Culture,” by Hoseus and Liker, for example, recounts that the Toyota system itself has been called a “stressful management system,” especially in companies that mistakenly believe it is a model that has to “pressure” people into solving problems.
Far from that, it is about making the entire process of problem solving, continuous improvement, waste elimination and greater value creation something truly positive and rewarding for everyone. If that is the case, people will want to do more and more.
After all, people who feel safe, happy and in a balanced environment work more and better every day. And everyone wins.
