Dive Brief:

• More than 60% of 18- to 34-year-olds said their productivity at work suffers due to stress over poor work-life balance or unrealistic professional demands, according to a new survey from Mental Health America (MHA) and Total Brain.
• More than a third of the 1,000 Americans surveyed said emails, text messages and social media updates helped make them mentally unproductive at work. Half of respondents said they feel "severely or moderately mentally fatigued" by stressors currently affecting their lives.
• "With work being such an integral part of a person's life, we can't ignore the mental health implications," MHA President and CEO Paul Gionfriddo said in a news release. "At MHA, we know it's so important for workplaces to consider physical AND mental health, and these results indicate that more employers need to pay attention to both."

Dive Insight:

Findings from recent research continue to indicate that mental health issues are impacting the workplace. Employers must recognize work as a common source of stress; in a 2018 netQuote study, 60% of workers said their jobs stressed them out. A more recent study from on-demand behavioral health provider Ginger found that most workers (83%) experience some form of stress once a week, but many cannot access proper care to treat their stress.

This may pose a big problem to workers, who identified jobs, health and finances as their biggest worries in a recent Colonial Life study. As employers grapple with what appears to be an increasingly stressed out workforce, they also must cope with a costly decline in productivity. The same Colonial Life study estimated employers lose billions of dollars in productivity due to workers who are disengaged or otherwise unproductive due to stress.