Mental health refers to cognitive, behavioural and emotional well-being. Mental health is concerned with how people think, feel and behave. On the other hand, accessibility refers to making a website usable by as many people as possible. Traditionally, accessibility is more about people with disabilities. However, making websites convenient also benefits other categories, like mobile device users and those with slow internet connections. You can think of accessibility as ensuring that the disabled get the same experience and opportunities as ordinary people when using websites.
Web development is very demanding. Having high levels of competition, long hours and critical moments, the development sector can be receptive to poor mental lifestyles. Day in and day out, millions of people use websites to conduct shopping, conduct research, advertise their products, conduct meetings and seek information and insight without a second thought. For disabled people, utilizing sites is not quite simple, especially when only a fraction of websites are considered “accessible” to the disabled. As the technical talent market continues to be super competitive, all kinds of employees are reexamining how and why they work. With such conditions, web development companies and leaders are obligated to their employees to prioritize and support employee mental health, well-being and accessibility.
Mental illness affects around 1-in-7 people worldwide (11-18 per cent), and mental illness can decrease productivity, creativity and other job effectiveness features. When mental health deteriorates, it not only threatens employees but also the company’s productivity in general.
Why Mental Health And Accessibility Matter
Around the world, many software developers are experiencing work-related mental health problems. Workplaces with poor working conditions can drive mental health issues for workers. Usually, this results in less engagement with the work, lower productivity and higher chances of burnout. Software developers facing these struggles are remarkably at risk of experiencing barriers to access to their work and more significant mental health results because of the job conditions.
Web development is celebrated for generating substandard working conditions. This is so because most developers’ work is complex and contributes to negative health consequences. This affects their mental well-being and physical needs at large.
Here is a list of factors that can result in mental health conditions while at work
- Extensive exposure to computer screens and little natural light can result in depression.
- Job stressors like hitting targets, meeting deadlines, meetings and criticisms can generate anxiety and cause adverse bodily symptoms.
- Uncollaborative partners can also be an issue.
Mental health can result in loss of labour by a particular company. When employees suffer mental health disorders, some quit their jobs to find others: at the back of their minds, “better ones”, others get fired for not being productive enough. This usually happens when the managers don’t know what is happening with their employees, and others might as well die. This makes a company run short of labour affecting its profitability and overworking the remaining staff to cover the missing position. The company also spends money on replacing staff as it’s an expensive process.
As a software developer, you must be mentally healthy because your work requires your brain to be at total capacity. The fact that the work of software developers is very complex and requires active cognitive functions makes them vulnerable to mental health conditions. Mental health conditions such as stress, loss of motivation, deteriorating memory and more can result in developer burnout. Developers with burnout produce code with low quality and use, don’t hit targets, and miss deadlines. Developers with mental issues affect their productivity and the company at large. Burnout drains companies’ creativity and productivity and affects their ability to deliver. Therefore, tech companies have to prioritize the mental health of their employees to ensure higher-quality products.
It would help if you created a healthy work environment to combat the lost revenue and work. This means an accessible one. Accessibility in web development goes hand in hand with putting first mental health to ensure employee productivity. When you commit to accessibility, you build a comprehensive workflow for remote teams.
Tips for Prioritizing Mental Health and Accessibility
Managers have to focus and prioritize the mental wellness of their employees. Prioritizing mental health is essential because some factors that negatively affect an individual’s mental health may be at work. The good thing is to create a healthier working environment, whether remote or in the office, is not that difficult. Here are a few approaches you implement in your work environment to better support your workers. This calls for making resources available and creating standard strategies to support a more open and empathetic workforce.
- Train your team in web accessibility
Launching mental health and accessibility topics into a web development working environment are challenging to promote many employee engagement initiatives. Web accessibility training helps your team develop an extensive understanding of how humans with disabilities can utilize the internet and the standards for digital accessibility. Web accessibility training can be insightful, especially to those with little prior disability-related experience. To those with a humble background in accessibility standards, this can help fill the gap.
Action tip: Before working on the website’s accessibility, consider the kind of impairment you want to optimize. For those with visual impairments, make the video content accessible and visible and attach audio descriptions.
- Provide mental health resources
Any web development team must have a quick-to-react Human Resource department to provide the resources needed to combat mental health issues. Unless your Human Resources department has psychiatrists, they are not equipped to treat mental disorders. However, they can create awareness on how to notice mental issues and where an employee can seek help. HR can offer the ideal resources to employees and provide employee assistance programs and training sessions on dealing with mental disorders at work. Also, you can create a team responsible for obtaining mental health and accessibility assistance that aligns with the benefits package offered by your company.
Action tip: As a team leader, once you notice mental health issues among your employees, you can personally offer referrals to mental health experts or send them to HR. If the workplace has a return-to-work program and remote work options, you can ease the employee’s stress while recovering at home.
- Reduce crunch time
Minimizing crunch time as much as possible is another good approach to prioritising mental health and accessibility. Crunch time affects creatives, including software developers, coders and engineers. The concept is that these kinds of employees are expected to work long hours and continue until they meet their deadlines. When employees are crunched, they feel the struggle when trying to be creative. Compulsory crunch situations are neither accessible nor are they conducive to employees’ mental health. Crunch time usually generates burnout, can disunite working families, and it’s impossible to deal with employees with numerous conditions.
Action tip: Create a valuable employer brand and avoid all the contrary consequences like the poor reputation that can result in crunch time.
- Build an open and inclusive dev culture
To mitigate mental health sparks and encourage accessibility, create a more flexible work environment. This means having a workforce that can telecommute, compact their work schedules, work a crossbreed schedule, attend social events or make any other sensible adjustments that encourage a healthy work-life balance. Teamwork is everything. When facing issues, you must talk and talk things through. This is why building an open and inclusive culture is so important. While creating this inclusive work culture can take time. Having people, you can do these things not only help you express your feelings but it can also make you feel more engaged and generate better quality.
Action tip: You can talk about what is bothering you with a colleague, grieve or celebrate moments that transpired in the past and share concerns about the future. This looks very straightforward, but these simple steps can help you balance your mental health. Acknowledging and talking about mental health is a weakness. But it’ll assist you to know yourself better.
- Take time for yourself.
Taking some time for yourself every day is essential. It’s crucial to set boundaries and take some focused time off to refresh. Take a walk, go for a workout or read a book in your leisure time. Sometimes, this might mean taking a leave and stepping away from work for a little while. Taking time for yourself helps you calm down from the stress, tension and fast-moving moments that your work has been putting on you. Prioritizing personal time is very important because it also helps you improve the quality of sleep and make some personal improvements in your life. If you don’t have enough time, try to go for activities that will take you quite some time to do again, like going shopping but at least create some time for yourself.
Action tip: When you take some time off, visit family and friends, go for a 2-3 day vacation, read books, or see a therapist, it could be anything you love doing. Prioritize personal time the exact way you prioritize work meetings.
- Focused and Unfocused Modes
To maintain mental health, it’s crucial to not push yourself beyond your daily cognitive limits. This is way much easier said than done. One of the best approaches to stabilising your mental health is to shift between focused and unfocused thinking. When you take three hours executing something important, it could be a meeting or super intense coding, then move to unfocused thinking by working on tasks that call off complicated solutions. This gives your brain a break to process the information you loaded when working on the focused work.
Action tip: Implementing focused duties for about three to four hours could be fixing a bug or reviewing code. For the next period, switch to tasks that don’t require focused thinking to be implemented.
- Remember to workout & do exercise
Physical health is an inbuilt part of mental health. Even minor issues such as sitting in an uncomfortable position can result in broken neck vessels or squeezed nerve fibres. This can block your brain from accessing enough oxygen and glucose. It’s essential to take breaks and implement quick workouts every two hours.
Action tip: You can do at least ten push-ups but if push-ups make you uncomfortable, at least take a walk outside the office for about fifteen minutes.
Conclusion
Building an inclusive dev culture, working out, training your team in web accessibility and providing mental health resources are some of the few approaches you might utilise when you want to prioritize mental health and accessibility for your web development team. By implementing these strategies, you can lower the stress levels in your work environment, promoting better mental health and keeping work open to developers already struggling to balance their life demands.
