■■ Curating culture: There is no shortcut to strong company
culture. While free lunches and team drinks are “nice to haves,”
open communication, strong leadership and work-life balance
top people’s wish lists. Forty-one per cent of people looking for
new positions say company culture is the main reason.
■■ Beefing up benefits: Respondents indicated that career training
and progression are crucial considerations for job seekers.
Three out of the four most sought-after benefits are training
and development-related, with 76 per cent of Generation Y
respondents wanting a personal development allowance.
MANAGING “COGNITIVE HYGIENE” CAN HELP
EMPLOYEE MENTAL HEALTH AND IMPROVE
BUSINESS PERFORMANCE
Among employees who are attending work while experiencing a
form of negative stress, many are struggling to cope and as a result,
it is having a negative impact on their overall mental health. Now
more than ever, organizations are seeing increasing risk levels of
individuals with mental or physical health issues and/or illnesses
in the workplace. A new whitepaper released by Morneau Shepell
found that coping skills and levels of resilience were significant in
predicting health outcomes and employees’ engagement levels.
Why supporting employees to develop their coping skills and re-siliency
is good business, by Dr. Bill Howatt, chief research and
development officer for workforce productivity at Morneau
Shepell, is centred around the concept of “cognitive hygiene” – the
ability to effectively manage negative thinking, maintain cogni-tive
abilities to solve problems and make good decisions without
thinking negative thoughts that influence mental health.
Breaking down tools for successful cognitive hygiene
Morneau Shepell’s Total Health Index (THI) – a research tool
assisting employees with finding their coping skills baseline, rec-ommendations
and actions – found that in a typical organization,
close to 30 per cent of the population can benefit from developing
news
coping skills. In this whitepaper, Howatt separates successful cog-nitive
hygiene into two key elements: developmental coping skills
and sustainable daily actions.
Howatt says that developmental coping skills provide an in-dividual
with insight on how they think, training them to better
solve problems and make good decisions. These skills range from
understanding emotional intelligence to psychological hardiness
and teaching the mind to deal with life’s events. Sustainability cop-ing
skills – those that facilitate and support positive mental health
– range from practicing mindfulness to learning effective mood
management.
“To put it in everyday terms, practicing effective cognitive hy-giene
follows the same key elements of a healthy oral hygiene
regime,” said Howatt. “The success of both is dependent on daily
practices and actions. Oral hygiene starts with the developmen-tal
skills of learning how to brush and floss teeth correctly and the
sustainability skills of brushing after each meal and flossing each
day. Comparatively, cognitive hygiene requires developmental cop-ing
skills such as insight into emotions, followed by sustainability
coping skills, which involve the daily actions one takes to avoid
negative, unwanted thoughts.”
Investing in coping skills to improve business performance
According to the whitepaper, practicing cognitive hygiene is espe-cially
important in the workplace, where stressors come in many
forms and if left untreated, can result in mental health issues that
ultimately affect wellbeing and performance.
Vasin Lee / Shutterstock.com
Filion Wakely Thorup Angeletti LLP
Welcomes Rusty McLay
Filion Wakely Thorup Angeletti is pleased to announce
that Rusty McLay has joined the firm’s London office as a
Senior Partner.
Mr. McLay has 22 years’ experience as a
management-side labour and employment lawyer.
He comes to the firm from Conestoga College
Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
where he was Chief Administrative Officer and
General Counsel. For many years, he also served
in various roles at tech innovator BlackBerry,
including as Vice President, Legal.
In London, Mr. McLay joins partners Frank
Angeletti, Peter Thorup, Casey Dockendorff,
Cheryl Rovis, and Brian MacDonald, as well as associate Danny
Parker in advising and representing a wide variety of clients, including
universities, colleges, hospitals, municipalities, transit authorities,
manufacturing, construction and service companies, and the broader
public sector.
Filion Wakely Thorup Angeletti LLP is one of Canada’s most highly-ranked
law firms practicing exclusively management-side labour and
employment law.
Visit http://filion.on.ca/ to learn more.
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