A senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus is suggesting that private-sector employers put an Employee Assistance Programme in place to help workers cope with the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Professor Dwayne Devonish, Professor of Management and Organisational Behaviour, said he was toying with the idea of leading the development of a national employee assistance programme that would allow all companies to use as a guide to provide critical assistance to employees who are especially mentally affected by the ongoing pandemic.
“I am actually doing some work now looking at the phenomenon of long COVID. This is a phenomenon that people who have been infected and recovered still have lingering symptoms, not just physically but mentally,” he said.
He said they’re still too many stories of people recovering from the virus but they were “still suffering from the effects of long COVID”. “Even though employers have recognised that you have been discharged [and] you have your negative status, a lot of employers are not sympathetic to these individuals and I am recognising that there is a rising number of cases of persons with long COVID. It really behooves that the public health community really look into this matter of long COVID,” said Devonish.
He was delivering the recently held inaugural Professorial Lecture hosted by the School of Graduate Studies at the Cave Hill Campus, under the theme The National Workplace Wellness Policy for Barbados: Building Well Individuals, Well Workplaces and Well Societies.
Devonish said he believe it was necessary for employers to play a greater role in helping authorities understand the physical and mental effects the pandemic was having on individuals especially as they go back to working from the office.
“There are people who have not even been infected and they are scared. They are mentally traumatized and they are going back to work.
When we talked about the teachers returning to the classrooms one of the things I made absolutely clear, no level of physical distancing, no level of handwashing, no level of mask-wearing can address the mental health anxieties of any worker returning to the face-to-face environment. So it is incumbent on employers to recognise that they need to put services in place,” said Devonish.
“I think we need to leverage the employee assistance programme, there are still a number of organisations, especially in the private sector that does not have employee assistance programmes in place that can support workers, especially in this ordeal,” he said.
However, Devonish said for an employee assistance programme to work across all sectors there needs to be trusted among employees and employers and amongst co-workers.
“I am actually playing with the idea of having a national version of an EAP (employee assistance programme), so not just something peculiar to organisations and industries, but at most a national structure where employee assistant programmes can be accessed by a wider cross-section of the population.
In fact, I have an idea of having something which is an individual assistance programme,” said Devonish.
He did not give any indication as to how soon such a programme was likely to be developed but said it would take into consideration individuals who were unemployed and those in the informal sector.
“That is something I am thinking about, but I am hoping that for the medium and long term that there is an understanding that change-management is very important. I think in the long-term there would be an appreciation that organisations must evolve, organsisations must be proactive,” said Devonish.
“The difference between an organization barely surviving this pandemic and one that thrives is the nimbleness of that organisation, it is that organisation’s readiness to adapt and to change and of course to see continuous improvement as a way of life, and I see that for the long-term,” he said.
Dr Sherma Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Tourism at the Cave Hill School of Business and Management, also acknowledged the need for systems to be put in place to help workers cope with stress as a result of the pandemic.
She pointed out that working from home has blurred the lines between personal and professional lives for many individuals, with a lot of them unconsciously working longer hours and thereby opening themselves up to burnout.
“In other words, stress levels have risen exponentially for the vast majority of the workforce, putting pressure on people’s mental health,” said Roberts. She recommended that “employers everywhere should be intentionally engaged in developing sustainable wellness programmes for workers at all levels”.
(MM)
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