Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond for many businesses, employees have had to adapt to new ways of working due to disruptions in traditional practices. It is therefore crucial to understand the new challenges that employees are facing when it comes to taking care of their mental wellbeing at work. To that end, we distributed a survey to full-time UK employees (N = 451) to explore how supported they felt throughout the pandemic, and to identify whether there are any additional types of support they would like to receive. We also compared employees’ intentions to seek help before versus during the COVID-19 pandemic, and assessed their current attitudes toward mental health. Based on direct employee feedback, our results show remote workers felt more supported throughout the pandemic compared to hybrid workers. We also found that employees who had previously experienced an episode of anxiety or depression were significantly more likely to want extra support at work compared to those who had not. Furthermore, employees were significantly more likely to seek help for their mental health during the pandemic compared to before. Interestingly, the largest increase in intentions to seek help during the pandemic compared to before was with digital health solutions. Finally, we found that the strategies managers have adopted to better support their employees, an employee's mental health history, and their attitude to mental health all contributed to significantly increasing the likelihood that an employee would disclose a mental health concern to their line manager. We provide recommendations that encourage organisations to make changes to better support their employees, and we highlight the importance of mental health awareness training for both managers and employees. This work is of particular interest to organisations who are looking to tailor their current employee wellbeing offer to a post-pandemic world.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond for many businesses, employees have had to adapt to new ways of working due to disruptions in traditional practices. It is therefore crucial to understand the new challenges that employees are facing when it comes to taking care of their mental wellbeing at work. To that end, we distributed a survey to full-time UK employees (N = 451) to explore how supported they felt throughout the pandemic, and to identify whether there are any additional types of support they would like to receive. We also compared employees’ intentions to seek help before versus during the COVID-19 pandemic, and assessed their current attitudes toward mental health. Based on direct employee feedback, our results show remote workers felt more supported throughout the pandemic compared to hybrid workers. We also found that employees who had previously experienced an episode of anxiety or depression were significantly more likely to want extra support at work compared to those who had not. Furthermore, employees were significantly more likely to seek help for their mental health during the pandemic compared to before. Interestingly, the largest increase in intentions to seek help during the pandemic compared to before was with digital health solutions. Finally, we found that the strategies managers have adopted to better support their employees, an employee’s mental health history, and their attitude to mental health all contributed to significantly increasing the likelihood that an employee would disclose a mental health concern to their line manager. We provide recommendations that encourage organisations to make changes to better support their employees, and we highlight the importance of mental health awareness training for both managers and employees. This work is of particular interest to organisations who are looking to tailor their current employee wellbeing offer to a post-pandemic world.

Neurons, even in earliest sensory regions of cortex, are subject to a great deal of contextual influences from both within and across modality connections. Recently we have shown that cross-modal connections from vision to primary somatosensory cortex (SI) transmit contentspecific information about familiar visual object categories. In the present work, we investigated whether SI would also contain content-specific information about sounds depicting familiar hand-object interactions (e.g. bouncing a ball). In a rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, participants listened attentively to multiple exemplars from three sound categories: hand-object interactions, and control categories of pure tones and animal vocalizations, while performing a one-back repetition counting task. Multi-voxel pattern analysis revealed significant decoding of different handobject sounds within bilateral post-central gyrus (PCG), whilst no significant decoding was found for either control category. Crucially, in the hand-sensitive voxels defined from an independent tactile localizer, decoding accuracies were significantly higher for decoding hand-object sounds compared to both control categories in left PCG. Our findings indicate that hearing sounds depicting familiar hand-object interactions elicit different patterns of activity in SI, despite the complete absence of tactile stimulation. Thus cross-modal connections from audition to SI transmit content-specific information about sounds depicting familiar hand-object interactions.

Neurons, even in the earliest sensory regions of cortex, are subject to a great deal of contextual influences from both within and across modality connections. Recent work has shown that primary sensory areas can respond to and, in some cases, discriminate stimuli that are not of their target modality: for example, primary somatosensory cortex (SI) discriminates visual images of graspable objects. In the present work, we investigated whether SI would discriminate sounds depicting hand–object interactions (e.g. bouncing a ball). In a rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, participants listened attentively to sounds from 3 categories: hand–object interactions, and control categories of pure tones and animal vocalizations, while performing a one-back repetition detection task. Multivoxel pattern analysis revealed significant decoding of hand–object interaction sounds within SI, but not for either control category. Crucially, in the hand-sensitive voxels defined from an independent tactile localizer, decoding accuracies were significantly higher for hand–object interactions compared to pure tones in left SI. Our findings indicate that simply hearing sounds depicting familiar hand–object interactions elicit different patterns of activity in SI, despite the complete absence of tactile stimulation. These results highlight the rich contextual information that can be transmitted across sensory modalities even to primary sensory areas.

No abstract