How to Help Highly Sensitive Employees Optimize Their Mental Health in the Workplace

Job-related stress has increased by several notches since previous generations. This holds truer for highly sensitive employees, who make up nearly 20 percent of the workforce. Discover how to:

• Identify highly sensitive employees
• Use tech to enable positive mental health in the workplace
• Leverage highly sensitive employees as your biggest asset

Given today’s dynamic business environment, stress is a major challenge for any workplace. From retail workers dealing with heavy store traffic during the holiday season to sales personnel meeting targets, from marketers perfecting the next campaign to developers completing a sprint, every sector is now dealing with heightened stress levels.

In fact, in a recent survey by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 75 percentOpens a new window of employees agreed that workplace stress has increased significantly since the previous generation, making mental health in the workplace a pressing issue for employers.

While poor mental health in the workplace has often been blamed on job type, the reality is much more complicated. Pressure, like any other stimulus, affects every individual differently. The American Institute of Stress states it is “not the job but the person-environment fit that matters.” That is why employers need to explore strategies to alleviate stress for those who are more susceptible: highly sensitive people (HSPs).

Learn more: Transforming Employee Wellbeing: A Focus on Stress Mitigation

How to Identify a Highly Sensitive Employee

The term “highly sensitive person” was coined in the early nineties, made popular by Elaine Aron, who has done important work in this area. According to Elaine, up to 20 percentOpens a new window of the population may be highly sensitive.

Caroline FergusonOpens a new window , a corporate coach working to help HSPs improve productivity, reveals that highly sensitive people have a more intense experience of the world around them. So, how do you identify an HSP to rewire your strategies for mental health in the workplace accordingly?

The answer is simple: Talk to them.

While many believe that sensitive individuals are introverts (and that may be true to a certain extent), HSPs are also friendly, team-oriented, solo workers, or anything in between. However, in the workplace, they react to stress triggers (for example, deadlines, feedback, critical meetings) differently, which can affect their mental health.

By checking in with them after such potentially stressful events, employers can approach an employee and ask if they identify as “highly sensitive” via transparent, one-on-one conversations.

4 Tips to Help Highly Sensitive Employees in the Workplace

Here are our recommendations on getting HSPs to achieve their potential in the workplace by helping them optimize their mental health.

1. Offer flexible working conditions

Given that HSPs cannot be classified strictly as introverts or extroverts, employers need to make flexibility integral to their workplace. This includes work-from-home options where applicable, easy shift changes, flexible hours, and the opportunity to collaborate through various media, not just in office in person.

A number of solutions focus on flexibility as an enabler for mental health in the workplace, including HR tools with real-time scheduling capabilities or  remote collaboration platforms such as ConfluenceOpens a new window .

Learn more: Three Benefits of Fully Remote Working Policies

2. Adopt continuous two-way feedback

Once a year, mission-critical appraisal cycles can trigger stress and negatively impact mental health in the workplace. Instead, it is advisable to use a feedback mechanism that shares continual responses on work assignments, as well as allows HSPs to voice their issues. For example, 15FiveOpens a new window , an automated performance management platform, enables continuous feedback and one-on-ones as part of the review cycle. This allows for a great opportunity to initiate a conversation with them, something essential to their mental wellbeing.

3. Connect Performance Management to “Purpose”

Performance management is another area where sensitivity can make a worker more self-critical than usual. By linking performance management to larger organizational goals, employers can help HSPs look at the big picture and not be derailed by short-term obstacles.

4. Include apps for mental health in the workplace as part of employee benefits

A simple but frequently overlooked way to ensure mental health in the workplace is by improving access to relaxation/entertainment tools. A subscription to a meditation app or even ambient music can bring down stress levels significantly. Employers can add solutions such as CalmOpens a new window or HeadspaceOpens a new window to their benefits packages.

Learn more: 5 Ways to Promote Mental Health in the Workplace with Technology

Turning HSPs into Your Biggest Asset

Being highly sensitive is not a disorder, say experts. In fact, sensitivity is a common trait that brings several advantages to a professional scenario. By fostering mental wellbeing in the workplace, you can help HSPs become:

• Great team leads – Because they are acutely aware of their surroundings, HSPs can identify the subtleties of an assignment and allocate it to the most fitting member.
• Great strategists – Being able to anticipate potential problems is the first step towards finding a solution, a trait that sensitive individuals possess and that makes them strong candidates for strategy-focused positions.
• Great innovators – ResearchOpens a new window links high sensory perception to traits such as inventiveness, imagination, and creativity, meaning HSPs may be better positioned for disruptive activities.
• Great mediators – Equipped with a keen understanding of problematic situations, HSPs can actually help solve conflicts and ensure alignment to quality standards.

All that’s needed is a well-thought-out and carefully mapped environment. By combining empathy with technology to ensure positive mental health in the workplace, you can empower highly sensitive employees to turn what can be perceived as their Achilles’ Heel into a competitive advantage.