The pandemic may be easing, but the stress for workers carries on. Uncertainty may be the worst part of it: Are we back in the office–or not? Should my younger kids get vaccinated? Does my manager understand how shorthanded we are? Can we plan a vacation?

“People still have anxiety, they still are having trouble with their kids and their parents and their relationships,” said Christine Celio, Ph.D., the national clinical director for mental health integration at One Medical. “But on top of that, you’ve got the health and financial strain, people still struggling with child care [as well as] what has happened when people have had to quarantine, not seeing people’s families for years, and personal differences about risk tolerance.”

In the face of this, the workforce is struggling to stay productive. According to this year’s Women in the Workplace survey by McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.org, 42% of women and 35% of men say they are burned out, up from 32% and 28%, respectively, in 2020.

With all this in mind, “Is it any wonder that the Great Resignation is happening right now? It seems awfully easy to burn those bridges and walk away,” said Fast Company staff editor Lydia Dishman, who moderated a panel discussion on individualized stress relief at From Day One’s October virtual conference on “Promoting Employee Mental Health, Wellness and Stress Reduction.”

With many workers quitting and companies struggling with shortages of employees to get the work done, managers need to renew their focus on the people still on the job. “So what can employers do to help their people feel better and not head for the exit?” Dishman posed to her panel. A few of their suggestions:

Behavioral Changes Need to Start With Managers

Kelly Butler, SVP of global HR services at Rackspace Technology, a cloud-computing provider, said it’s up to corporate leaders to model healthy behavior if they want to mitigate the effects of stress on workers. For example, if executives are telling their employees to take advantage of their paid-time-off benefits, the leaders need to be doing it too.

Butler said her team has embraced small behavioral changes that have an outsized impact on morale. Back when they were all in the office, team members at Rackspace used to take part in walk-and-talk meetings, outdoors with coffee cups in hand–an experience they now replicate with smartphones and earbuds.

Before beginning more formal, sit-down virtual meetings, Rackspace leaders often instruct individual team members to take a deliberate pause. “Sometimes I just pull up a five-minute meditation from YouTube or it’s a five-minute stretch break. There are a lot of great, free resources out there,” Butler said. “It’s really just reminding people, ‘It’s OK to take five minutes.’” And while on vacation, workers are encouraged to share photos with colleagues from their time away from the company.

Adjust the Relationship With Technology

As much as technology has helped teams connect through the pandemic, side effects have emerged, most notably Zoom fatigue, when exhaustion sets in after too many video meetings, which comes with their increased cognitive demands. New research indicates that women and newer employees may be most susceptible to the problem.

Yolanda Haynesworth, EVP of health and wellness at Grey Group, the global ad and marketing agency, said workers at her company have received stipends to help make their work-from-home space more comfortable and enjoyable. But whenever possible, leaders are also encouraging Grey workers to “move away from tech,” and do their best to reestablish personal connections with safe, in-person meetings.

As part of trying to disrupt the always-on aspect of remote work, Haynesworth said Grey is easing back on what she called the “run, run, run” mentality. “Because if you don’t, everyone will just keep going,” she said.

Provide Attainable Options for Preventative Care

One of the sneaky things about rising stress is that it can give people the feeling that they don’t have time to do anything about it. Julia Corcoran, Psy.D., director of clinical strategy and experience at Modern Health, a mental health and wellness platform, said that those who wish to adopt routines geared toward better mental health might need multiple options, so they can settle on at least something.

With seemingly everyone so busy, “going to someone and saying, ‘Well, if you just meditated for ten minutes a day, we promise research says you’ll feel better,’ that may be true, but they struggle to find that time,” Corcoran said. Modern Health medical professionals have gone out of their way to present a number of options to employees, she said. “Is it a two-minute meditation? Is it a meditation group? Is it a healing circle for the Black community that we started this year? There are just different ways that people are going to want to engage.”

Normalize Mental Health Care Conversations   

“People usually know that they need an annual physical exam; that’s not something that’s stigmatized,” said One Medical’s Celio. But in many cases they don’t consider going to the doctor for mental health treatment, in part because of the social stigma against it. That’s why One Medical redefined its annual exam into a more holistic treatment event they call a “Live Well Visit.”

“We ask about mental wellness and how people are feeling, so we start that conversation early. And then we really work on mental health promotion during those visits,” Celio said. “You don’t have to be broken to get the help you need. And I see that as a psychologist–people come to me when they are at their worst, and we go back in their history and we see places where someone could have intervened earlier.”

Doing what Celio called “preventative work”–having discussions about mental health concerns before they possibly become more extreme, and treating them with prescriptions for better sleep, a healthier diet, reduced substance use, and more exercise–can also save money because “not everyone needs to go to therapy.”

Employers: Keep Your Ears Open

Leaders can communicate with workers in charge of their Employee Assistance Programs (EAP), which are often under-utilized, to heighten awareness of any endemic issues throughout the staff. Jennifer Lavoie, director of employee well-being at Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare, said her company collected data from its workers about the mental health issues they’re facing–depression, stress, anxiety–and shared it anonymously with EAP partners. If the HR leaders at Piedmont can get workers to engage more with the EAP, perhaps the specialists on that side of the exchange could ask “more pertinent questions” of struggling workers, Lavoie said.

“We’ve been telling these workers that they’re superheroes for two years now. Superheroes should be just fine, right? So we’ve kind of done them a disservice,” Lavoie observed. Demonstrating what an HR leader might advise an EAP specialist, Lavoie added: “If they’re calling you, they’re calling for a reason that might be for their child, it might be for their partner, but let’s really try to extract what they need as well.”

One of the things that HR leaders hear is that workers aren’t aware of all the benefits they can use. “We’ve had a lot more touch points with human resources where they actually had to come back and say [to workers], ‘You do know you have benefits where you can get massages,’ because most people just don't even know about it,” said Haynesworth. In general, employees need refreshers about the options they “can tap into for their own personal well-being.”

Provide for Financial Emergencies–and Let Employees Help

Since personal finances are often a significant source of stress, an increasingly popular program that many employers are offering is emergency financial help for employees who get into tight spots because of natural disasters, health emergencies, and other unexpected events. Typically, these disaster-relief programs dispense charitable grants to the workers in need, drawn from funds donated by the corporation as well as workers.

“Philanthropy is actually an awesome way to have people connected, because we all feel so helpless right now,” said Ashley Oster, VP of marketing and partnerships at E4E Relief, which partners with companies to coordinate charitable programs. “The employer being able to make that a part of their culture and having things like employee relief set up, having ways to give set up, is really meaningful to their employees.”

As research has shown, giving can be good for your health, lowering blood pressure and reducing depression and stress, while increasing self-esteem and happiness.

Reaching out to employees with all these types of opportunities to improve their mental health, especially now when “the world is on fire,” Haynesworth said, can help boost morale and engagement across a company. It’s up to leaders to take the first step. “If we’re not acting during that time,” Haynesworth continued, “that is going to be a huge blow to these employees in terms of respect.”

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.