MBA1856 Mental Health and Your Business

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Because your business means the world to you. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson we'll discuss mental health and your business. If you told me about 20 years ago when I started my entrepreneurial journey that you need to make sure you and your team's mental health is in check when you are running a business, I would be confused. I'd be like what are you talking about? What does mental health have to do with running a business? What I learned over the years is that it has a lot to do with your business. Our mindset, how we process information will affect how we feel, how we think and of course how we act, the way we approach the day and how we approach our work. So in today's lesson I'm going to talk about some healthy habits and strategies you can implement to improve the mental health of your business. We're talking about you, your colleagues, the whole team. These are very simple things, but they're super important because at the end of the day you are only as Good as the people, people that run the business. Whether you have a team of two people, three people, or 30 or 300, I always say business is 95% mental. It's all in your head. So if you're mentally healthy as well as your teammates, your business will be healthy. I got some strategies to share with you, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. If you, your parent or spouse served in the military, you could join our family. Our members saved an average of $70 a month on auto insurance. When they switch, tap the banner or visit usaa.com join today to check your eligibility restrictions apply. I want to begin by identifying what do I mean by mental health. Feeling stressed, feeling burnt out, feeling demotivated. These are all symptoms of poor mental health. This just means that you have to be aware of this. This means that it's okay if you're experiencing a funk. It's okay if maybe one of your team members not performing as they used to because they might be in a funk and we call it a funk. But really what it is is that there's a mental exhaustion that's happening here. This is a real thing. If you are mentally drained, it's gonna affect how you feel and like I said, affect your performance. And you don't want that to happen to yourself or anybody else on the team. So there's a few things that I find really works in at least trying to help you and your team have a pretty good baseline of mental health. The first thing is implementing a culture of praise and camaraderie. So you want to make sure that everybody on the team understands we all need to be praised at some time. And they're not just going to learn this out of thin air. You have to lead by example. Some people are not used to doing this. How do I know this? I used to be one of those people. I used to be somebody who just forgets to praise people. I forget to say thank you. I forget to kind of give people shout outs and give them a little bit of love publicly, privately, meaning, hey, great job. You did a wonderful job. I want to give a shout out to this person because we were able to solve this problem because of their efforts. Sometimes we're so busy as entrepreneurs, sometimes as leaders that we forget to praise. And what you want to do here is create a culture where you lead by example, by praising other people, genuinely praising them. This is not pandering. This is make a big deal out of things that deserve it. Like when somebody gets a promotion or Somebody completes a year working at your company or even if it's just their birthday. The point here is that when you create this culture, it encourages other people to do the same, to say thank you, to give other people shout out, to give praise to others and say, hey, this is a team effort. We're all doing this together. People will enjoy their job more when they're in that environment where they know that they're going to be recognized or they know that their efforts are not going to just be overlooked, that what they do matters. And I know I've worked in environments like that where maybe things in my personal life are not going so well, but I would love to go to work because, hey, this place is safe. This place. I feel good, I feel recognized, I feel respected. So you can create that environment for your team members in your culture, in your team. And it starts with you. So even if it doesn't feel natural at the start, put a post it note on your desk that says, did you praise today? And you could find a reason to praise somebody on your team for something. It could be something as simple as sharing a great comment from a customer or testimonial and praising the whole team. It doesn't have to be, you know, a promotion or something that happens once in a while. It can be something simple. What does this do with mental health? Well, again, you're creating an environment where people feel accepted. They feel that this place is a place they want to be around. This is the opposite of feeling stressed. This is the opposite of feeling anxiety. Most people are not afraid of hard work. They just want to make sure it's in an environment that they don't feel persecuted in. They feel like they can take some risks and they'll be recognized for the hard work they do. The next tip I recommend is frequent one on ones. A one on one could just be a quick chat. It could be a five minute chat just to see how's that person doing on your team. It could be even just on, you know, slack or on messenger, just saying, hey, just want to check in. How are you doing? How's your family? How are you doing during lockdown? Whatever it is, just checking in. Checking in means you are taking time out of your precious day because I care about you. And that's the message people get. Wow, thanks for asking about me and not following up with like, hey, it's good to catch up but I got a task for you. Just purely checking in and seeing how they're doing. Just like checking in on a friend and I literally go and do the rounds. I have a schedule where I like to check in on people, even if it's just a quick message and just say, hey, how you doing? How's it going? And sometimes it'll be somewhat work related, you know, so there's context. I might say, hey, I know you're working on this project. It's been really challenging. I know. I've heard from, you know, your manager. I just wanted to say thanks for giving it your all. I hope everything else is going well for you. What do you got plans for the weekend? This is making an effort to make genuine relationships with people in your workplace. My goal when I do these one on ones is I want to let everybody know on my team that I got your back. If you're going through something personally, professionally, I've invested in you by hiring you, I want to see you at your best. I want to make sure that you're happy and healthy. And that's why I'm checking in on you. Because if you're not, I want to make sure I can help. Again, just showing support. Number three, you need to have a leave policy that works. Sometimes people don't feel like they're up to going to work because of mental health reasons. It's not necessarily they're sick or they are going on vacation. Some people just need some time away from the job. And I can totally relate to that. I'm due for a break for some time. And you don't want disgruntled, burnt out team members. You want people at their best. So what we do at Webinar Ninja is we require our team members to take their assigned leave. What does this mean? That means if they have holiday left over, they gotta use it. It doesn't roll over the next year. So everybody has an X amount of days off outside of medical leave, outside of, you know, public holidays. And they have to take it. And what this does is that it forces them to use it as much as they can. Of course, if they don't use it all up, that's fine, but they shouldn't feel guilty if maybe one day they just need some time away, they need to take care of something, or maybe they just need some alone time and will come back, refresh and recharge. Especially this will happen after some stressful times in your business like a launch or you just released a new feature in your software company and everybody's been working to the bone. I know this has happened recently with our company, with our engineers who work through weekends and the Last few weeks, some of them had some time off, which is well deserved. They need to take that time off to recharge their batteries. So make sure your leave policy encourages people to take time off, because some people won't take time off. This reminds me of an experiment I saw that the company basecamp did where they changed their leave policy to an unlimited leave policy, meaning they can take as many days off as they like unaccounted for. So what happened? Well, it actually backfired. People took less days off because there was no suggested how many days you should take off. So they kind of said, I only take off when I need it. And they were really hard on themselves. And what happened is that, you know, what became the standard is the least amount of days anybody took. So if one person only took five days off so far, everybody else will be like, well, I can't take more than that because then it looks like I'm the person taking most days off. It's pretty interesting how the human psychology works, but the point here is that you need to give that license to your team. You need to say, hey, you have, you know, 10 days, you have 15 days. Take them the way you want to take them. And you got to take them because otherwise you're going to waste them. And this kind of keeps people top of mind. Hey, I need to take a couple days off here or there. Even if they're not planning on going anywhere, it gives them a chance to recharge their mental health batteries. Okay, does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets, and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food, but you're grown now, so you do what you want. Share and share alike with the 20 piece McNuggets from McDonald's for just $6 limited time only. Price and participation may var cannot be combined with any other offer to wrap up today's lesson. There's a lot you can do to help you and your team have a better handle on mental health in the workplace. One of the things I highly encourage people to do in their business, no matter what kind of business they run, is to incorporate fun. We forget about fun. Fun is important. When you're having fun, you don't feel like you're working. You feel like you're having a blast. So try to incorporate fun as much as possible. Some simple things that we do is we do an all hands meeting. Everybody in the company gets together and we meet once a month. And usually in those meetings, we play games, we have fun, we tell jokes, we share stories. This is a good time to get together. We also try to do a team retreat once a year. Even though we're in COVID lockdown, we're doing a virtual team retreat again. Fun, games, snacks, prizes, fun. You know, it's okay to have fun and you're going to invest a little bit of time and money in creating these opportunities, but it's going to pay off tenfold. People will enjoy their job, you'll have less turnover. People will feel rewarded and feel recognized and it will really affect people's overall feelings towards your company, towards your business, towards going to work every day. Of course we're not perfect and we're learning along the way and we're trying to incorporate different ways to improve mental health in our company because I know it's important. But to wrap up, you can't forget about your mental health. As a leader, I'm saying this and it's a reminder to myself as well, because it's easy to get burned out. It's easy to take time off too late. You know what I'm talking about, where you have nothing left in the tank and the first day you take off, you actually get sick because your body's just done. I find that if I don't have this in check, I will have very little patience with myself and others. And that's not a good place to be. So you gotta catch it before it gets to that place. You need to lead by example. You need to do this before anybody else does. Test it on yourself and share the results. That wraps up today's lesson. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 OMBIE Show. Make sure you hit subscribe so you never missed our next episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Tomorrow we're going to focus on you. We're going to focus on how to make more time for health and wellness. When we're talking about physical health, we're talking about mental health and just generally feeling good every day so you can perform at your best. Tune in for that tomorrow, okay? It's going to be really, really informative. And I'm going to share with you what has worked and what has not worked in my experience when it comes to this topic. I'll see you then. Until then, take care. Of foreign. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks. Or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply.