Many family businesses focus on creating long-term value and place significant importance on supporting multiple stakeholders, including their employees. For these family business leaders and owners, employees are like family. And, right now during the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns, many employees are suffering. While much emphasis is appropriately placed on physical health and economic needs, mental health may be neglected.
At the start of the pandemic, our own businesses rightly focused on making the work environment safe from COVID transmission and ensuring that as many team members as possible could work remotely. However, as a family business leader, Iâve struggled to understand what role I, and the board, have in supporting the mental health of our team. Pre-COVID, I would see our team in the office and could better discern how they were doing. But todayâs video calls, meetings and check-ins provide much less insight into the well-being of individual team members.