The Purdue Extension Farm Stress Team has developed a Business Toolkit for any employer to utilize in efforts to identify stress and mental health trends in their employees. Created in direct response to needs identified by business owners like you, this toolkit provides a structured approach to evaluating the current state of your employees’ mental health along with guiding resources for improving it. You can find the toolkit on our website extension.purdue.edu/farmstress. Taking an interest in the mental health of your employees is a huge step towards improving your workplace environment for the better. Improving your work environment could help with productivity, retention and recruitment of employees in the long run, so taking the time to evaluate what you have is a huge step in the right direction.
Our goal is to provide you with something a little more formal to identify the needs of your employees that allows them to retain some anonymity – which in turn allows them to be more honest in their answers. Asking employees to raise their hand in a staff meeting if they’re experiencing stress at work or at home isn’t necessarily going to get you the best results, if any. We’ve done the research for you and developed a survey that you can use to really get a better understanding of what your employees are going through.
First, the survey questions focus on understanding workplace norms, stressors related to work, stressors related to home, and includes “I feel” statements that give employees a chance to really take ownership of their answers. In each of these categories, there are multiple questions designed to investigate the root causes of stress and mental health issues.
Then, once you’ve collected all your completed surveys you can input the results into the spreadsheet provided. As you put the data in, you will start to see some trends among responses and can tally up the number of “agree” “disagree” answers to see what the most common answer to that question was. This will only tell you part of what you need to know, though, and we’ve went ahead and provided descriptions of what to look for in the responses to each question. Not all “agree” answers will be good indicators, and not all “disagree” answers will be negative indicators, so make sure to read the guide carefully. Many of the response descriptions include ideas for improvement that may be useful.
Also included in the toolkit are some posters you can print and hang, and a resources sheet specific to Indiana that you can provide to your employees.