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In episode 124 of “The JoyPowered® Workspace Podcast,” JoDee and Susan discuss helping businesses and staff members move through the emotions many have experienced due to the pandemic with Dr. Saundra Schrock, CEO of Levelhead.

Many people are tired of talking about and thinking about the pandemic. In reality, though, we should be doing the opposite; the psychological impacts of the pandemic are going to be with us for some time in the future.

As she works with organizations, Saundra’s been seeing a lot of people feeling “blah,” low energy, and not excited about the future. Researchers are beginning to call what we’re experiencing “post-pandemic trauma,” and it’s landing people in a category along the mental health continuum called “languishing.”

To help your team through this, one thing you can do is gently and easily open a dialogue about it. Understand that while this has been a collective trauma, it’s also an individual trauma that each one of us experienced differently. Once that dialogue is open, you need to be prepared to do something about it; every solution will be slightly different, but the goal is to help employees build individual resilience.

Empathy and compassion skills will also be crucial ones to hone, since there are very strong opposing views around the pandemic. To build these skills, start by getting buy in as close to the top as you can, then have an open dialogue about what’s going on. Next, go into a collaboration with employees where you invite them to share what they really need, want, or are seeing in the workplace. Finally, start with the one thing you can do that will make the biggest impact on the organization.

Saundra shares some basic things you can do to help protect and improve your individual mental health. Build a gratitude habit, even if you can only think of one thing to be grateful for. Visualize a feeling of kindness, love, and healing for yourself, then for the people who are closest to you, then send it out to the world. Studies show the brain can be rewired, so repeatedly feeling gratitude, love, and kindness can cause your brain to default to feeling that way automatically.

In this episode’s listener mail, a listener asks for suggestions on handling HR burnout. In the news, a recent study reviewed more than 2,000 actual job interviews for unconscious gender bias.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Purple Ink
• Susan Tinder White Consulting
• The JoyPowered® Organization
• Levelhead
• Thriving in a Global Pandemic and Beyond
• “In job interviews, men dominate most of the conversation with women”

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