Mental Health and the American Worker: What Workers Want

As many companies wonder why their workplaces remain ghost towns, a new survey reveals that COVID concerns are not what’s discouraging staff from coming into the office. In fact, they are working from home because of the greater work-life balance it purportedly offers. Indeed, workers place such a premium on this balance, that a quarter of workers who changed jobs did so for the ability to work from anywhere. What’s more, Baby Boomers who left their jobs for this flexibility did so at twice the rate of Millennials. The survey findings also reveal that workplace flexibility goes a long way in supporting workers’ mental health. 70 percent of workers say that flexible hours and work location are the top policies businesses can enact to support their mental health.

Dr. Srini Pillay, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer at Reulay, Inc. and former head of the Outpatient Anxiety Disorders Program at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital joins Rebecca Ray, PhD, Executive Vice President of Human Capital at The Conference Board, to discuss the findings of this new survey examining career plans, factors driving workers to pursue new job opportunities, opinions about remote work, mental health, and more.

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