The garment industry is one of the industries that is being severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Job insecurity and loss of income could lead to mental health issues for people; while for others fear and anxiety about this new disease can be overwhelming causing workplace stress.

Understanding the importance of positive mental well-being at the workplace, particularly at the garment industry, the ILO’s Better Work Indonesia (BWI) developed an online stress management training, “Positive Well-being in the Workplace in the Face of COVID-19 Pandemic”, targeted to both workers and management of its garment factory partners.

The online training is aimed to help the participants preventing stress due to constant negative news surrounded the outbreak, understanding how people’s mind and body react to both negative and positive environment and managing well-being of ourselves and others at the work.

This two and a half-hour training provides a venue for participants to interactively share their feelings and learn ways to overcome stress during the outbreak with an expert. The training also provides practical information, tips and exercises on preventing news-related stress, understanding people’s body and mind as well as managing emotion.

A series of videos are also developed to make the training more interactive and usable even after the training. These videos covers:

• Effective sharing methods to ease the burden of mental issues
• Journaling to generate mental comfort
• Mindfulness
• Anti-stress breathing exercise
• Simple exercise for muscle relaxation
• Understanding good stress
• Managing stress from media

The ILO’s BWI has conducted this training four times in end of April and early May for BWI staffs and factories. Forty five factories joined the training with a total participant of 70 people. They found the exercises, practical information and tips and videos provided in the training useful and beneficial for managing their mental health and keeping them positive and hopeful in the midst of the outbreak.

“In the midst of crisis like this, we tend to forget the importance of mental health and stress management. We really appreciate the enthusiasm shown by the participants and we support their commitment to share what they have learnt and the materials given to their colleagues and families,” said Maria Vasquez, Chief Technical Adviser of ILO’s BWI.

Due to a high interest and demand for the training, BWI is planning to facilitate additional sessions of this training.