How are you prioritizing psychological capital in your workplace? It’s become imperative for companies to address and support employees’ mental health and wellbeing as we continue to adjust to long term work from home environments, pandemic economic disruptions, and heightened focus on the impact of racial and societal issues.

The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy $1 trillion each year in lost productivity. 

Mental health professionals are also seeing a mental health crisis energy as a result of quarantine. Ryan Smith, CEO and co-founder of Qualtrics shares the following with Harvard Business Review, based on a global study of more than 2,700 employees during March and April of 2020: 

• 75 percent of people say they feel more socially isolated

• 67 percent of people report higher stress

• 57 percent are feeling greater anxiety

• 53 percent say they feel more emotionally exhausted

Over the last few months in our work with leaders and their teams, we have seen encouraging real-life examples of how leaders with more psychological capital display abilities of adaptive resilience and lead their teams to thrive, even in tough times like now. 

We’ve seen that these leaders are quick to assess what their team members need psychologically. They adapt work protocols and systems to facilitate connection and communication between individuals and teams working from home. They role-model taking breaks and taking care of themselves. Some have even shifted their success metrics. 

More importantly, these leaders are checking in on their employees’ emotional state rather than their performance rate, coaching employees to take a moment to pause when facing challenges. Some are encouraging connections by welcoming employees’ children in conference calls if they’re present while keeping meetings fun and light-hearted, focusing on the learning process rather than putting all the stakes on the outcome.

Celebrate the importance of mental health and bolster your team’s happiness and performance by focusing on psychological capital in the workplace. Here’s what you need to know about advocating for the safety, trust, and mental health of your employees. 

Understand the Meaning and Power of Psychological Capital  

To build psychological capital, and reap the benefits of doing such, like greater creativity, productivity and employee happiness, you must first understand what it is and how it impacts individuals and the environment of the workplace.  

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) explains that psychological capital is based on four key traits:  

• Efficacy: the confidence to accept challenging tasks and work towards desired results. 

• Resiliency: the capacity to recover from problems or adversity. 

• Hope: a combination of willpower and way power that results in the ability to persevere. 

• Optimism: making positive assessments of a future successful outcome.  

According to the CCL, building psychological capital is an important factor in workplace performance often associated with lower absenteeism and cynicism, and higher satisfaction and commitment. 

But that’s not all; 2019 research found that bringing humor to your leadership practice as a tool for building psychological capital can “provide an open and friendly atmosphere for employees, thereby encouraging creativity in the workplace.” 

Most importantly, building psychological capital opens the workplace in a way that unifies teams and creates a space where everyone is truly listening. As Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times and the paper’s senior editor of live journalism explains in his article about Google’s Aristotle Project: 

“We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.” 

The good news is you can build this psychological capital in your workplace. The CCL continues: “Unlike psychological traits such as extraversion or cognitive aptitudes such as intelligence, psychological capital is a psychological state.” 

By developing self-awareness (mindfulness) and training emotional intelligence, leaders can increase their psychological capital and resource from it to navigate challenges and opportunities. 

Invest in Mental Health Awareness

For too long, there’s been a stigma surrounding mental health, especially when it came to discussing it at the workplace. A recent survey from Mind Share Partners found that 86 percent of workers believe their company should talk about mental health. However, less than half of the survey respondents say mental health is a priority at their organization, and even fewer say their leaders are advocates. 

Smart organizations know that mental health affects individuals as a whole and workplace performance, which is why many companies destigmatize the conversation and invest in mental wellness initiatives.  

Use some of these examples to see how you can invest in mental health awareness in your workplace: 

• Starting April, Starbucks teamed up with startup Lyra Health to expand mental health benefits for its thousands of employees, with a goal of tackling the stigma and giving employees the support they need.

• Delta brought Mental Health First Aid at Work, a training provided by the National Council for Behavioral Health, to their Atlanta employees, teaching them how to talk about and address mental health with co-workers.

Even simple acts like allowing staff to use PTO for mental health days, or implementing weekly check-in calls with managers and HR to discuss challenging issues, can go a long way in building psychological capital. Start by opening the lines of communication and let employees know they can and should discuss their mental health. 

Mentor on Mindfulness

Mindfulness isn’t just for morning rituals or your weekly yoga practice; it can be beneficial in the office as well. According to research from Positive Psychology, mindfulness in the workplace improves social relationships, promotes resiliency, enhances task performance, as well as optimizes decision making and intuition. As you can see, many of these benefits go hand-in-hand with the key tenants of psychological capital. 

To encourage your team on their journey to become more mindful, institute a mindfulness mentor. Whether that’s you, your team leads, or a variety of individuals who volunteer, make sure it's a top-down push. Remember that mindful leaders are better leaders. A recent landmark scientific study found that mindfulness has a multitude of benefits for leaders that then spill over to their team and overall organizational practice. 

Meditation is one of the primary (and best) ways to get more mindful, so send out an email with a list of meditation resources for your staff, such as;

• This guide to starting a meditation practice. 

• Links to guided meditation apps like Insight Timer, Headspace, or Calm. 

• Consider launching a meditation work break initiative, allowing staff to take time for meditation in the office a few times per week.

Be a Positivity Cheerleader 

How you speak and interact with your employees has a serious effect on the overall environment of your workplace. Not to mention, two of the key factors of psychological capital have to do with positivity: hope and optimism. As such, strive to be a positivity cheerleader to encourage affirmative attitudes in your team. 

A positivity cheerleader spreads uplifting energy and sets an example by having a confidently hopeful outlook. How does this translate to psychological capital? Positive reinforcement can quite literally rewire your brain so that it's easier for you to perceive impending success (i.e. have hope and optimism). 

Tali Sharot, professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, explains this phenomenon: “Our research has shown that the brain encodes positive information (such as learning that the likelihood of obesity is lower than previously thought) better than negative information (such as learning it is higher). In fact, people often assume negative information is unrelated to them, but view positive information as very much relevant, which generates an optimistic outlook.” 

 This optimism can be learned and can help build cognitive resilience. 

In our mindfulness programs, we help participants become aware of how they talk to themselves when they experience a setback because people who are pessimistic tend to see setbacks as personal failures, and believe they are permanent and pervasive across different areas of their lives. People who are optimistic, on the other hand, tend to see setbacks as arising from certain conditions and view them as temporary and only applicable to certain circumstances. 

In this work, we see that most participants realize that they adopt an optimistic style when they are talking to others and switch to a more pessimistic style when they are talking to themselves.  

Creating awareness about this in the workplace is especially helpful because when leaders notice that they or their employees are engaging in disempowering views of themselves or the situation, they can encourage ways of looking at a situation differently. They can enable transformation through appreciating what worked well and providing real evidence to suggest that failure is temporary.  

Build Psychological Capital in Your Organization 

Psychological capital is different from tangible forms of capital, but it’s still worth its weight in gold in the workplace. If you want a team of confident, resilient, and optimistic individuals that have inner resources to support their performance into success and results, focus on improving psychological capital—now, more than ever, your employees need you to make this shift. 

Talk to us about our online mindfulness programs to help leaders and teams increase adaptive, emotional and cognitive resilience to navigate the new reality.

p.s. If you ever need a warm hello, a 😊emoji, or some kind words to uplift your spirits this season, pop over here and say hi. We're here for you.