June 2023: Professional Wellness Month

According to National Today, “Professional Wellness Month is celebrated each year in June and it throws light on the workplace’s role in creating a holistic environment for employees. It also focuses on how organizations that place emphasis on professional wellness are largely successful, attract top talent, and drive employee retention.”

Why is professional wellness so difficult?

Professional wellness has become an increasingly urgent topic in the days of digital work. In the past, people had to be at their office, school, or other workplace in order to complete their work, and they usually had to be there at the same time as other people in order to work. In other words, the work had to stop when people went home. However, with the invention of smartphones, people became able to answer emails and calls from anywhere. Gradually, their bosses and managers (or team members and subordinates) started expecting them to be available at all times. This is known as the “digital leash”. Online connectivity has allowed some work to be more flexible (remote work, on-demand classes), but it has also allowed the workload to increase (constant emails and messages outside of “work hours”, expanding online homework, higher expectations of knowledgeability). Digital literacy has become an essential skill in addition to basic literacy (reading and writing) and mathematical/financial literacy. As expectations of quantity and quality increase, more employees are feeling overwhelmed and experiencing burnout.

Why now?

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated (worsened) the problem of the digital leash while adding other forms of stress, leading to a mental health crisis. Anxiety and depression rates increased dramatically, and these stressful conditions can trigger many other physical and mental problems, including headaches and vision problems, poor appetite and digestion, pain in the muscles, joints, and other organs, low quality or quantity of sleep, inability to focus or learn, delusions, and mood disorders.

What can we do?

While some causes of burnout are systemic, there are some individual changes that you can make to your life in order to maintain wellness. These activities, as shown in the self-care wheel, can help you to improve your own health.

To support systemic wellness, consider the following measures:

• Join a worker’s union that advocates for better pay and shorter working hours.
• Vote for politicians that advocate for workers.
• Say no to requests for “favors” that make you uncomfortable or require you to work late, and accept rejection of your requests by colleagues and classmates.
• Participate in anti-discrimination training and learn more about the challenges of other people (workers with disabilities, women in the workplace, ethnic and religious minorities in the workplace, foreigners in the workplace, men who take paternity leave, etc.) to create a more supportive environment.
• If you have authority over other workers or students, reflect on your expectations for them. Are you part of the problem?