STRATEGY FOR MANAGING THE MENTAL HEALTH OF STATE INSTITUTIONS AND ENTITIES’ EMPLOYEES IN REMOTE-WORK ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

Nowadays businesses and state institutions face new challenges. With the Covid-19 epidemic, remote working has had negative impact on the mental health of remote employees. The purpose of the study is to consider the essence of mental health and individual skills that are provided by remote work, as well as the formation of a strategy for mental health among employees of enterprises and government agencies. In this context, it is important to develop the strategy to provide strong mental health in quarantine conditions. The article proposes to define the mental health of state institutions and entities’ employees as a set of soft skills and hard skills. The latter are to provide the willingness to work in an organisation for a longer period of time, as well as the endeavour to deepen and develop their competences in remote-work environment. This is supported by the classification of mental health skills which includes communication skills (interpersonal skills) and key performance indicators (KPI). Remote work modified communication skills into writing skills and afforded ground for highlighting intercultural, interpersonal and business correspondence. In remote-work environment, key performance indicators are identified as a set of components where online-leadership, resilience and online team-working are among the most significant skills. Online-leadership and online team-working imply the ability of a leader (team member) to provide efficient team work (individual work) using digital technologies while experiencing the lack of non-verbal means of communication. Resilience is defined as strong mental integrity in terms of possible correlation of professional and private life. So, two strategic directions in mental health management are proposed focusing on individual and collective mental health. Finally, it is argued that effective implementation of mental health management strategies result in higher labour productivity, planned key performance indicators and lower staff turnover.