HR plays an important role in resolving disputes, addressing concerns and complaints, liaising between employees and management, promoting employee engagement, and disciplining misconduct, among many other tasks. All of these tasks require emotional sensitivity and understanding, and can take a toll on you. While taking care of the mental health and wellness of your employees is a rewarding part of any HR professional’s job, you may forget you need to take care of yourself, too.

As an HR professional, you are often asked to deal with stressful and mentally taxing problems, which can lead to burnout. Adding to the mix lately, HR professionals have had to maintain composure when dealing with very stressed out and concerned employees on top of implementing many new processes. Empathy and compassion are two valuable traits an HR person can have, but we need to take steps to avoid exhausting our capacities for them.

When your employees have a difficult time, do they have somewhere they can go for support? The stigma around mental health issues is slowly fading, but we have more work to do when it comes to supporting mental health and wellness in the workplace.

Everyone goes through difficult times, and it can sometimes feel like those difficult times have become never-ending. What employers and HR professionals do to support employees can make a huge difference in a company’s culture, employee retention, and overall well-being. How you act when an employee is struggling says a lot about what you value as a company. Take a minute to think: what does your organization do right now to help employees overcome adversity and thrive?

While we are all working hard to get our lives back as close as possible to our normal routines, employers are worried about what will happen if they have to shut down again. It’s stressful to contemplate going through this again, but it doesn’t help to pretend it’s impossible. You owe it to your organization and your employees to prepare for such outcomes. Employers have also been thinking about how vacation time employees have left will further affect operations.

Is there anything you can do to prepare your business? We received many questions like these after our most recent COVID-19 webinar. We’ll take a look at some of the most popular questions on the topic.

You might be excited to get back to work, but are your employees? Some may be saying, “Yes!” but others, “Not so much.” Many of us spent the last couple of months distant from everyone outside our household, so it’s natural that employees have concerns about suddenly returning to their normal routine after spending all this time distant from co-workers, customers, and the public in general.

So what do you do if an employee refuses to return? Or what if an employee is pushing to continue to work from home? We received many questions like these after our most recent COVID-19 webinar. We’ll take a look at some of the most popular questions, but you can also download the full webinar at the bottom of this article to get valuable advice from one of our HR experts.

Are you and your employees tired of working from home? Well, we might have some good news! Many jurisdictions across the country are starting to pull back restrictions, allowing many Canadians to go back to work. While it might still be some time before employees working from home can return to offices, there is hope right now.

There are a few things you need to consider, though: just because you can let everyone come back to work, should you? And, if you choose to, what other challenges may arise? We received many questions like these after our most recent COVID-19 webinar. We’ll take a look at some of the most popular questions, but you can also download the full webinar at the bottom of this article to get valuable advice from one of our experts.

With some provinces loosening restrictions and beginning the return to normal work, it’s important that social distancing and other preventive measures are not forgotten.

Most people are familiar with the basics of good hand hygiene—soap and water, thorough scrubbing, avoid sneezing into your hands or touching shared surfaces, and so on—but the concept of social distancing is new to many. While most of us have caught on to it in grocery stores and other essential trips, new challenges may begin to arise when employees return to work.

Big or small, your contributions are important. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have done amazing things to help. From making masks to transitioning employees to working remotely for the first time, everything Canadian business can do to help each other matters.

So you may be asking right now, what can my organization do to help others during this pandemic?

Many employees are suddenly working from home while essential workers continue to go into the workplace, leading to profound disruption of normal routines. Consequently, mental health and wellness are important topics many employers should be thinking about.

Employees working at home are dealing with taking care of children and family members, financial struggles, technical challenges, and may even be starting to feel like the walls are closing in. This not only puts a strain on their ability to do their job, but also adds to mental health illness and decreases mental well-being. Essential and frontline workers are dealing with additional wellness issues that may be beyond our ability to explain. There are no perfect solutions, but as the pandemic continues, could a little perspective help us cope?

It’s hard to believe it’s been more than a month since the WHO declared a pandemic, and almost as long since provinces began declaring states of emergency. While we settle into what the prime minister is calling our “new normal,” it’s important to look at what we’ve done so far and what we can still do to prepare.

But with so much uncertainty about the coming weeks and months, how can we know what to do? We start by looking to the past to prepare for the future.

We received many questions during our recent webinar on COVID-19. In case you missed it, you’ll find a link to the recording at the bottom of this article. In a difficult time like this, we wanted to make sure the answers to these challenging questions were available, so we’ve created a multi-part question series on our blog to help ensure employers and HR professionals have access to the information they need. We will continue to post these COVID-19 Question Series articles, so keep your eye on our blog and subscribe for updates.

In this article, we discuss some precautions you should take to slow the spread of COVID-19. You may be forgetting to clean some commonly touched surfaces.