Mental and emotional stress in the workplace can take a heavy toll on individual employees. It also has a financial impact on companies. Investing in resources to tackle burnout can benefit employers and their staff.
The mental health of workers is becoming a priority for a growing number of companies. Mindletic is a European project, based in Lithuania, which aims to build resilience to stress, prevent work-related burn-out and reduce the costs that this entails for businesses. Its founder, Ieva Vaitkevičiūtė, defines it as follows:
‘MINDLETIC is a digital emotional intelligence gym where people can train their emotional intelligence individually,” she says. “On the company level we give data driven insights from anonymous and aggregated data that is collected from their employees. And through data, they can prevent and predict costs that are related to burnout cases and managed stress.”
Over 30% of Europeans say they suffer from work-related anxiety. France tops the league for burnout. According to the Institut national de recherche et de sécurité (INRS), ‘the social cost of occupational stress is estimated at between 2 and 3 billion euros, these figures including expenditure on care, absenteeism, cessation of activity and premature death.
In Vilnius, the start-up 1stdibs.com works with Mindletic. During the pandemic, management realised that is needed to invest in mental health. Employees use the various functions of the platform to assess their energy levels, their emotions, meditate. It pays off, according to Gedas Monginas, the firm’s General Manager.
“95% are like using the app,” he says. “So I think more and more companies are understanding that having a good work life balance, emotional balance, physical balance, it’s like employees are more productive if they’re happy. So it’s better to invest in your existing employees than like training new people to do the work you need to do in the company.”
Self-help to combat stress
When the company reaches out and colleagues practise self-esteem, the group dynamic changes. That’s what Algimantas Stuopelis, who works for another start-up, CAST AI, tells us. For the past six months, he has been spending a few minutes a day developing his emotional intelligence, and it’s helping him.
“Whenever I am doing these check ins, whenever I’m going through the training that Mindletic presents for you, really… I’m able to understand myself better and react to situations like stress a bit more thoughtfully, I would say,” he says.
Mindletic’s total budget is 510.000 euros, 47.05% of which comes from the EU’s Cohesion Policy and 52.95% from Vilnius University and other private bodies.
Tackling the taboo
The project also involves around thirty specialist psychologists, like Rokas Salevicius. He believes that mental health and burnout should no longer be taboo subjects.
“I wouldn’t see burnout as something really bad that needs to be eliminated. It’s our attempt to tell ourselves that maybe we can try to slow down, to, achieve results, while taking care of ourselves.”
Burnout and depression are the second leading cause of work incapacity among the self-employed. These phenomena increase with crises that have a major impact on entrepreneurs, such as the war in Ukraine or the Covid crisis.
Source: Euro News
