Mental health awareness growing, but employers and workers are not always on the same page
Here are four key messages for employers from Ginger's third annual report on employee mental health.
The pandemic has brought employee mental health issues into sharper focus. The challenge for businesses now is to align employer support with worker needs.
“Fundamentally, executives and employees agree mental health is an important issue that employers should support,” said Russell Glass, CEO of Ginger. “However, there’s a significant gap between CEO and employee perceptions of available mental health benefits.”
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Ginger, which provides mental health services, surveyed employees and business leaders about several mental health topics. It distilled the results into four key messages for employers.
1. Employees and CEOs are optimistic about the future. Although 2020 was a year of anxiety and uncertainty, 2021 is proving to be a year of optimism. Last year, 70% of employees reported feeling more stress because of the COVID-19 pandemic than ever before in their professional careers. In 2021, although 58% of employees agree that COVID is still a top stressor at work, 95% of employees are feeling optimistic about life returning to normal and are looking forward to in-person visits with friends and family, and opportunities for personal growth.
2. CEOs overwhelmingly believe that employees’ mental health affects business outcomes. Nearly all CEOs surveyed report investing in their own mental health, with 94% of CEOs receiving mental health support for themselves and focusing more on mental health at their companies. CEOs also recognize the impact that employees’ mental health can have on work, with 80% believing that poor employee mental health negatively affects employee productivity. Meanwhile, 95% of employees report that mental health support helped them feel more positive, less stressed and more productive at work.
3. There’s a disparity between CEOs and employees when it comes to believing that companies do enough to support mental health. Many companies have invested in mental health benefits, and yet employees aren’t sufficiently aware of them. In fact, 96% of CEOs believe they are doing enough for employee mental health, yet only 69% of employees agree. And although 70% of CEOs say they’re accepting of emotional and mental health issues in the workplace, only 35% of employees believe this is true.
4. CEOs and employees continue to experience high levels of stress and are increasingly relying on technology-based mental health care for help. Nearly half of employees report experiencing high or extreme stress over the past year — a 7% increase from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. Meanwhile, use of technology-based mental health services has increased from 29% at the beginning of 2020 to 48% in 2021. Use of mental health benefits overall (both virtual and other) has increased 39% over the last year.
“Our research found that both employees and CEOs are overwhelmingly optimistic about the future,” Glass concluded. “I take comfort in this finding and share this sentiment as I look forward to the year ahead in which we advance closer to Ginger’s own mission of a world where mental health is never an obstacle.”
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