Covid-19 pandemic: Employees, senior executives face mental health problems: study

KARACHI: A comprehensive study on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the workforce has revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, homes working workers and chief executives suffered from mental health problems.

The study was conducted by the global technology company Oracle and the workplace intelligence firm “Workplace Intelligence”. More than 12,000 employees, managers, HR leaders and C-Suite executive across 11 countries was surveyed, found that C-Suite executives struggled to adapt more than their employees.

Younger generations experienced the most burnout. Study reveals that India, UAE, China and the U.S. had the most workers reporting the pandemic has negatively impacted their mental health.

C-level executives have struggled the most with adapting to remote work realities and report they are suffering from mental health issues more than their employees, but they are also the most open to finding help in AI. 53 percent have struggled with mental health issues in the workplace more than their employees (45 percent). C-Suite execs also had the hardest time adapting to virtual lifestyles with 85 percent reporting significant remote work challenges including collaborating with teams virtually (39 percent), managing increased stress and anxiety (35 percent), and lacking workplace culture (34 percent).

“The pandemic put employee mental health in the global spotlight, but these findings also showed that it created growing support for solutions from employers including technologies like AI,” said Emily He, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud HCM.

“The way the pandemic changed our work routines makes burnout, stress and other mental health issues all too easy. Everyone has been affected in different ways but overall, these findings demonstrate that implementing technology to improve the mental health of employees needs to be a priority for every business” She added.—PR

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021