On The Contrary | Episode 1: Mental health at work: Productivity vs well-being

Raj Mariwala, director at Mariwala Health Initiative, and Santrupt Misra, director of Group HR at Aditya Birla Group, discuss the role of individuals and organisations in promoting employee well-being and why mental health policies in the workplace need to be more inclusive.

"So mental health within the country is largely seen in a dominantly biomedical paradigm. Now, what that means is that just like physical health, mental health is assumed to be a set of symptoms. Then there’s a certain kind of treatment given, which could be allopathic medication or talk therapy at the most. And then what is expected is a reduction in symptoms, and then the person is cured. Now, this is a very limiting narrative, because what it ends up doing is focusing on only a symptom reduction approach. And, moreover, when you look at the way that persons with mental illness have been discriminated against, you’ll see that people aren’t actually willing to take support or help for this simply because they are then shunted out of spheres of life—such as employment, school, or maybe even transport. Now what we’ve seen in COVID is that people are coming to realise that mental health is also very deeply connected to our lives, the environments we inhabit, and our contexts. So it’s not enough for me to say, “I will provide maybe a psychiatrist or I would provide a counsellor,” especially when it comes to workplace mental health. It’s a piecemeal approach, which affects how we look at workplace mental health as well. Rather than saying “let’s look at our workplace” or “let’s look at a school”, we could see what the stressors borne out of this environment are. So, in a structural sense, that’s how mental health has been looked at. And there are definitely some alternative paradigms one should really consider if we are to look at addressing mental health issues". - Raj Mariwala

"Infrastructure, resources are important. But I believe in the training that you give to your leadership, how you hold your managers accountable. We last talked about obnoxious targets and obnoxious managers. I think one of the major things that we have done is to notice team engagement scores— when we get low scores about a manager, we have a conversation with the manager, we dig for deeper feedback and have a discussion with the manager on how to improve. Some people sometimes put down statements, for example, in public. Great humiliation, and humiliation creates an inferiority. I think our organisation is very trained to be clued into these kinds of root causes or factors in the context and we try to address it. Now, I do not like the idea of best practice because best practices can be many; whatever works in your context is a best practice, honestly speaking. I would always urge organisations to experiment in their own context on what works rather than simply copy paste somebody else’s practice". - Santrupt Misra

The episode was produced by Maed in India.