Work It Podcast: The tricky balance of mental health disclosure and performance at work
Managers shouldn’t shy away from having clear performance outcomes for staff with declared mental health conditions.
-2.jpg?itok=mdHkS5Fw "Work It Podcast: The tricky balance of mental health disclosure and performance at work")
Looking for a job or trying to nail it at your current one? Host Tiffany Ang and career counsellor Gerald Tan help navigate your important - and sometimes thorny - work life questions.
If you have a diagnosed mental health condition and you’re thinking of disclosing it to your workplace, what should you be aware of? How can your performance at work be rated with this consideration?
Khairil Baharudin, senior HR business partner at a tech firm and certified professional with the Institute for HR Professionals, lays out the pros and cons.
Here's an excerpt from the podcast:
Tiffany Ang:
So I spoke to several managers and one of them said that knowing that this person has a mental health condition is one thing, but as a manager, they assessed that the staff may not be the most dependable on certain business critical roles ... In this case, they would like to move the staff away from such positions, but there aren't any opportunities in the company.
I think that's the reality, right? Or the person doesn't want to move from this position. So in this case, how should then managers proceed?
Khairil Baharudin:
Well, it's a tricky situation for sure, right? When it comes to performance related issue for HR, it's a matter of black and white. We have check-ins every mid year and year end. It's a matter of the manager being quite truthful about their capability and capacity of performing certain tasks, right?
If they are not able to do that, that needs to be stated quite clearly in their performance review during year end or mid year, so they are aware, right? So I think that's really quite important.
I don't think managers should think about, “Oh, this person is having a mental well-being condition, not able to perform, therefore I should shy away from speaking about performance.”
Performance is performance, whether the (mental health) conditions are impacting the performance or not, the conversation has to happen at the end of the day. It's a business that the organisation is running.
The manager is also having their KPI and objectives.
If there is no way we can find the middle ground, there are existing HR routes or options, we can do for such employees. But this is considering that it's not related to mental well-being, right?
But if there's mental well-being, then the conversations still need to happen. We can't shy away from such conversation. I know that it's a little bit tricky and taboo for some managers and we do not want to be labeled as, “Hey, are you aiming at me or targeting me because I'm having this condition.”
And I think that's one worry that managers or companies have.
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