Your Mental Health: The Real “Pandemic Hangover.”
Economists are worried about economic slowdown. But the economy won’t speed up until we get our mental health in check.
Good Morning!
I hope you had a great weekend.
There are quite a few questions out there about our current economy. So many that it can be dizzying, actually. Sadly, we won’t have answers for them in the short term, and we need to reckon with that while we reel from the most catastrophic pandemic since the 1918 flu.
Today, I’m going to talk about who is asking those questions, who is attempting to answer them, and why outrage is not the answer, because it’s doing more harm than good for our collective mental health.
First: We know inflation is incredibly high, and that interest rates are continuing to rise. This should help the economy down the road, but right now, most Americans are dreading trips to the grocery store.
Second: This dread about spending is not only from inflation — which is in part due to superfluous government spending and wage increases— but from corporations price-gouging at rates higher than they’re raising wages.
Let’s repeat that louder for all the CEO’s complaining that work isn’t getting done or that no one wants to work.
In 2022, corporations posted record-breaking earnings calls, raising prices by about 8%, while only raising wages about 5%.
So when we think about why the work dynamic has changed so drastically, let’s remember those numbers. It wasn’t just because we nixed long commutes and pointless meetings. Wage growth and the potential for better work conditions affects the bottom lines of workers and consumers everywhere.
“Why haven't we asked for bigger raises? After all, companies say they are desperate to hire, and workers have a lot of power right now.”
- Stacey Vanek Smith, NPR’s Planet Money (and my former graduate school professor)
The Real Pandemic Hangover
Three months into COVID-19, The International Monetary Fund released a global analysis of the pandemic’s ongoing effects. The term used for their paper was “hangover,” referring to the macroeconomic consequences of past outbreaks and how they affected worldwide trade and economies.
This analysis helped direct some of the policy decisions made at a federal level, but it doesn’t address a different type of hangover: A Pandemic Hangover suffer by the workers/potential workers who either feel disengaged, unmotivated, or burnt out, even as the economy recovers.
Deloitte attempted to forecast a different hangover in their 2021 summary, Preparing for a potential post-pandemic hangover from health behaviors. This concept began to warm up more to what I’m referring to, but still didn’t quite get it.
Their anticipation, only half-true, was a rose-colored glasses prediction of what would happen; that people would pay more attention to their health (they have, in some respects) and prioritize their “at-home economy” more (we definitely have).
But a recent Qualtrics survey cited by The Wall Street Journal showed that the “importance” of work has diminished significantly to workers and managers alike.
This promotion of the at-home economy comes with the ire, or at the very least distaste, of many economists. There exists some doubt from prominent thinkers that four-day work weeks and flexible in-office policies are helping the economy regain its footing.
But the tug-of-war over the work week isn’t simply because there is an inherent distaste for work. Workers know now more than ever that working too hard isn’t good for their mental health.
“When I worked from home, I was able to be very efficient and finish work during my contract hours. Now that I am back to commuting and interacting with colleagues, that is more difficult to do, but I do not take home work tasks any longer. What gets done at work gets done, and everything else waits for the next business day. My family time is too valuable.”
Fighting The Pandemic Hangover Starts With two “POPS:” Proving Our Productivity and Progress Over Profit
The argument that working from home isn’t good for our economy quite simply doesn’t hold up for me, for the same reason that the opposing argument doesn’t work for those against it — there simply isn’t good enough data to measure productivity in both scenarios.
Productivity in corporate America is measured using a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics. Different companies use different measures, but the general metrics are as follows:
Output: Total production, services provided, units sold and shipped.
Revenue: The amount of income a company generates before expenses.
Time-Based Metrics: The efficiency of projects from time and capital expenditure
Quality: The efficacy of the products produced
Customer Satisfaction: How well customer needs and wants are met
Employee Engagement: How committed and focused employees are on the work
Human resources departments aggregate this data to make assessments of management, teams and companies as a whole. There are conflicting reports left and right about pandemic-influenced productivity: surprising swings upward and collaboration-lacking downturns are furthering the debate into a figurative CNBC screaming match.
The unfortunate reality is that it’s hard to prove our productivity. There are myriad factors at play for this problem, but the most notable include underreporting or flat-out misreporting of data, and the subjectivity of what “productive” is.
The use of incorrect metrics, biases in data collection, or the failure to capture all relevant information are significant pitfalls of the current data collection cycle. Companies and HR Departments might also be incentivized to misrepresent productivity data in order to achieve certain performance goals or to avoid disappointing shareholders.
Also, an already-disengaged workforce is not going to do so well reporting their own productivity if they’ve quiet-quit.
This leads to the second unfortunate reality of the Pandemic Hangover: work is harder for some because many worked harder during the pandemic than ever before.
Burnout doesn’t just happen. It’s a result of overwork and, quite literally, abuse. It’s not that America is “going soft.” It’s that the pandemic was a harder work environment for most people than some CEO’s are willing to realize, and the disinterest in work likely stems from a lack of attention to this matter from the top down.
More college students are considering dropping out than ever before because of struggles with mental health. Many students nowadays — myself included throughout my college and graduate career — work jobs to pay tuition, so I don’t know why we’re being reminded to constantly pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
The workplace is suffering as a result of the neglect toward employee mental health, but some employers are, thankfully, listening.
What we’re dealing with in the companies who are trying to reverse the problem, however, might be a case of “too little, too late.” Employees are not participating in wellness programs and not reporting enough progress in their mental health to show that these programs are making a difference.
Their needs to be an emphasis on Progress over Profit: Progress in the field of employee assistance programs instead of worrying about increasing EBITDA. Honestly, the companies who invest in this side of their business might help their revenue anyway. It isn’t too late to look there.
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