Michael Held is CEO and founder of LifeSpeak Inc. (TSX: LSPK), a leading whole-person wellbeing solution for employers and health plans.
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May is Mental Health Awareness Month in North America, and while support for mental health has long been a priority for employers, there are still some significant challenges to overcome. For example, fewer than half of Americans with mental illness receive treatment, and only half of Canadians with major depressive episodes receive potentially adequate care. Overall, access to mental health care remains a challenge, with wait times for appointments often stretching more than a month, and longer for specialty care.
This creates problems on both a personal and professional level. Mental health affects employees' moods and ability to relate to others. It also affects an individual’s ability to make healthy choices and is tied closely to employee productivity and satisfaction.
That’s the challenge, and the solution is in some ways both simpler and more complex than most people realize. Because the reality is that while mental health is often viewed in terms of large events—breakdowns, burnout and the inability to work—the reality is more nuanced. Maintaining good mental health is less a matter of withstanding a major traumatic event and more about managing countless small daily stressors. Employers who want to improve employee mental health will see better results when they help employees overcome these challenges and prevent them from happening again.
Mental Health Touches All Aspects Of Life
Mental health is intimately connected to everything in our lives and shouldn’t be viewed as a separate thing that we manage. Mental health is influenced by the challenges of raising children or caring for an aging loved one. It’s affected by employee relationships with substances and with their workout and nutrition habits. Even the environments where we work and live have an impact. Sensory health—the way we experience the world around us—plays a significant role in mental health and includes everything from the temperature and noise level in the office to the comfort of the desk chairs.
No employer will be able to provide a perfectly balanced environment and work culture for every employee, of course. There will still be pressure to meet deadlines and interpersonal conflicts to navigate. You’ll never please everyone with the thermostat setting. But as business leaders, it’s our responsibility to educate employees and provide them with resources to find their own balance.
How Businesses Can Support Mental Health Awareness
That starts with getting to know your workforce and understanding the source of their stress. As an added benefit, better understanding your employees will strengthen the culture of belonging within your workforce. This will also have a positive impact on mental health.
My firm conducted a study and found that employees who do not feel like they belong at work are 59% more likely to quit their job due to mental health concerns. In addition, McKinsey reported last year that people facing mental health or well-being challenges are four times more likely to say they plan to leave their job, three times more likely to report low job satisfaction and twice as likely to report low engagement at work.
Once you have a clear picture of your workforce, identify resources that help employees eliminate and block stressors that can throw them off balance. Help your team connect with what is important to them and empower them to take control of aspects of their life that might feel beyond their grasp.
For a variety of reasons—including access to providers, wait times and insurance protocols and coverage—providing employees with access to virtual support is an effective solution. Virtual mental health resources can act as a bridge between scattershot online searches and the professional therapy that many people struggle to access. Digital resources can also help employees maximize any time they have with therapists by allowing them to gain insights from mental health experts outside of appointments.
In addition, virtual resources can help employees identify the best care for their loved ones, educate themselves about substance use and set up workout routines that fit their schedule and ability level, all of which can help support better mental health.
When individuals have access to a suite of digital solutions, they can easily pick the resources that match their needs and ignore those that don’t. They can also share resources with family members—because when one person in a family unit struggles, everyone is affected.
Employees face challenges on a daily basis that their coworkers and managers know nothing about, and every one of those challenges has an impact on their mental health, well-being and performance as an employee. Give your team the tools they need to address those challenges so they can improve their well-being. You just may improve their quality of life at home, work and in their community.
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