From Mental Health Awareness to Support

What Your Company Should be Doing to Enhance Employee Wellbeing

About a month ago, organizations marked World Mental Health Awareness Day with a slew of LinkedIn posts and events highlighting the importance of mental wellbeing. However, as we move forward, it’s crucial that the conversation doesn’t fade. Mental health awareness and support shouldn’t be limited to a single day; it needs to be embedded in our organizational culture and supported daily.

Monark’s TL;DR

• 84% of individuals say their workplace conditions have contributed to at least one mental health challenge.
• Mental health awareness programs help reduce stigma and increase access to mental health resources, but recent data suggests that focusing solely on them could lead to long-term harm.
• Companies should aim to target employee wellbeing on a systemic level, targeting areas of employee concern such as limited autonomy, excessive workloads, and unfair treatment.
• Three ways companies can transition from simply increasing mental health awareness to creating a culture that supports it on a daily basis are: (1) personalizing wellbeing policies to specific role needs, (2) bringing meaning to work, and (3) holding their leaders to and helping them achieve higher standards. 

A Fine Line Between Support and Threat

At Monark, insights gathered through our Organizational Health and Effectiveness Survey reveal a clear and growing call for mental health and wellbeing support among employees. This feedback reflects a broader trend in which employees are increasingly prioritizing well-being and expecting their leaders and workplaces to prioritize it as well.

Here’s the kicker, though: newer research indicates that programs that highlight awareness of individuals’ struggling wellbeing such as mental health awareness posters or additional meetings focusing on mental health (though shedding light on and potentially assisting individuals catch symptoms earlier on) may pose a threat to individuals by causing them to think more about their concerns and worsen outcomes for anxiety and depression in the long term.  And while we often talk about mental health support as something that should help individuals through challenges when they arise (e.g., employee assistance programs), McKinsey suggests that promoting a healthier workplace culture can actually be a more effective way to ensure positive mental health and low levels of burnout across employees at your organization as such efforts work on a system instead of individual level.

Walk the Walk

Here are some ways your organization can move past talking the talk and reactive action towards actually start walking the walk and taking on prevention to promote employee wellbeing across your organization on a daily basis:

1) Personalize Policy:

84% of individuals say their workplace conditions have contributed to at least one mental health challenge. However, what those specific conditions are is strongly affected by the kind of work an individual conducts. Stressors for a customer service representative and oil rig operator will likely be quite different. HBR claims that tapping into these key differences amongst roles can be essential to building out policies that effectively improve mental health.

Doing so though requires a thoughtful listening strategy that provides the capacity to zoom into important sectors of your business. For example, Monark’s Organizational Health and Effectiveness Surveys provide our clients not only with line of site though thoughtful analysis of qualitative and qualitative responses but includes a filterable report allowing them to view results based on a number of self-selected sub-groups of employees providing them valuable insights into the specific stressors and concerns of employees in different organizational groups (e.g., contractors vs full-time employees).

2) Bring Meaning to Work:

One way to take an outward action approach to mental health, an approach that focuses on promoting mental health protective psychological states instead of reminiscing or diving deeper into negative thoughts, is to make clear the meaning of individuals’ work. At Monark, we’ve seen the protective nature of individuals finding purpose in the work they do and seeing how their tasks align with larger organizational goals. Organizations that score high in these areas frequently perform higher across a slew of indicators of employee health and wellbeing, even when qualitative comments indicate clear areas for improvement elsewhere.

Improving meaning in work can be done in a myriad of ways from frequent and clear communication regarding how your organization contributes to your community or ensuring individuals’ goals are created in a way that identifies their greater purpose and clarifies the role they play in helping those around them.

3) Hold Leaders to and Support Them in Reaching Higher Standards:

McKinsey points out that when asked about which factors in their jobs negatively impact their mental health and wellbeing, employees often mention unfair treatment, overwhelming workloads, limited autonomy, and a lack of social support. While policy changes can be critical to ensure such situations are addressed (e.g., implementing a right to disconnect policy to combat feelings of being always on call), middle managers are the first line of defense against such feelings. There’s a reason why middle managers are the true drivers of company success and why the phrase “People don’t leave jobs; they leave managers.” has become so popular. By training your leaders on managerial skills such as clear communication, effective delegation, and team building that go beyond listening to their employees troubles and instead prevent them you can produce a healthier work culture for all.

Equally important is defining what leadership behaviors are tolerable and which are not. Companies are often slow to fire offenders generating toxic work environments compounding harm for those affected and sending the message to other leaders that such behaviors are acceptable within your organization. With toxic workplace behavior being the most highly correlated factor with burnout, distress, depression symptoms, and anxiety symptoms in one McKinsey survey, it is clear that such behavior can not be overlooked.