Employers: We need to do more than just talk about mental health
Businesses have an opportunity to take the mental health of their employees seriously and solve a problem that is long overdue.
As the reality of the pandemic sets in, we’ve seen an influx of business leaders raising awareness around mental health issues and stigma. Personally, I’ve seen new blogs, webinars and endless resources on social media offering help and advice. While COVID-19 has profoundly—perhaps permanently—altered our lives, it also brought awareness to the crucial role the workforce plays in addressing mental health.
While many businesses have taken the path of offering employees resources around mental health, and offering meditation and workout classes, at a time when mental health prescriptions are on the rise, it’s simply not enough.
Related: Behavioral health: The hidden chronic condition costing you millions
While the rollout of vaccines has offered some hope, the mental health impact of the pandemic will be long-lasting, and not something a vaccine can solve for us. With more and more people noting that mental health care is crucial in their benefits plan, businesses have an opportunity to take the mental health of their employees seriously and solve a problem that is long overdue.
With this in mind, there are various ways to support mental health in the workplace. Among the many, maybe the most important is to encourage teams to take time off now that working from home is the “new normal.” While we may not be able to travel, studies show that disconnecting from work is imperative in avoiding burnout. Additionally, encouraging staff to take regular breaks throughout the day, whether it be having lunch with your family or stepping away from your desk, can increase productivity dramatically.
Lastly, while the commute to the office wasn’t always the best part of our days, it was an opportunity to fully disconnect and step away. Consider encouraging staff to mark the end of their day whether it be through a ‘virtual commute’ or other methods to unwind and fully transition from work life to home life now that everything is taking place in the same room.
Just as important to offer new mental health care resources in the workplace, leaders need to lead by example and champion their own well-being. Having worked as a psychiatrist, I’ve seen how hard it is to be open and communicate personal feelings. But emphasizing that maintaining your mental health and well-being is necessary, will not only push other people to feel open about having this conversation, but can actually increase your workplace productivity. In fact, the World Health Organization found that, for every $1 put into scaled-up treatment for common mental disorders, there was a return of $4 in improved health and productivity. When managers and executives begin to open up about their personal experiences, change can happen because junior-level staff will no longer be afraid to say when they aren’t “OK”.
Making these changes within your organization is a good first step in the right direction. However, no matter how powerful these changes are, it will always be a challenge to be able to support staff at an individual level. In order to achieve this, technology and particularly mobile health tech will be the most effective way to scale up. Now, as telehealth is growing, it’s become clear that evidence-based and ethical digital solutions offer the best and most accessible way to good quality mental health care at scale with the increased demand as a result of the pandemic. Further, the best technology solutions will be the ones that not only offer personalized solutions to staff, but don’t take a one size fits all approach as many apps do.
Recently, tech-driven options have had a bad reputation, but they actually have been found to boost well-being. A 2019 study showed that mobile health solutions significantly improved stress and well-being over time. It’s one of the primary reasons why solutions like telehealth (which increased by 154% during COVID-19) and mainstream usage heightened so much during the pandemic. At Koa, we’ve seen this firsthand. After working with a tech company in the UK that had a goal to increase the well-being of their staff during lockdown, we offered Foundations, our wellness app. Of their 7,000 person staff, 100% of the users said that the product improved their mental health.
Business leaders and HR teams have a new responsibility to highlight tech-supported resources as part of their benefits plans and further encourage their staff to try them. In doing this, business leaders are more clearly communicating their mental health benefits from the onboarding process while also ensuring that everyone across the business is aware of the available support. With the pandemic tainting our ability to be not only happy and stress-free, it’s also taken a toll on our productivity. Thus, making sure your staff has available resources will be key in nurturing the best workforce possible.
Using tech to give staff as much access as possible can also only work as long as those apps showcase a strong ethics-first commitment to users. For employees, even venturing into addressing mental health in the workplace is scary, so they need to be assured that their personal data is safe and won’t be shared with their employer.
It’s important to recognize that many mobile mental health apps aren’t protecting your data at all. A study of 36 apps found that 92% shared data with at least one third-party, and about half of those apps didn’t disclose that third-party data sharing at all. At a time when it’s imperative to capitalize on the surge of using tech to help with mental health in the market, this sector needs to do better when it comes to ethical solutions.
We are increasingly seeing intense levels of burnout as a result of people being in a fight or flight mode for nearly a year. As such, business leaders have a responsibility to change their stance on mental health in the workplace. If they don’t, they not only risk losing their staff to companies who will prioritize this, but they also risk losing revenue as mental health continues to impact productivity levels.
Oliver Harrison is CEO of Koa Health.
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