Mental health requests have skyrocketed, but company policies are lagging

Four years after the pandemic sent workers scurrying to work remotely, employers are still seeing fallout in the form of increased accommodation requests—this time not for COVID-19 but for mental health reasons.

Three-quarters of the 400 in-house lawyers, executives and HR people surveyed by Littler Mendelson reported an increase in requests for leaves of absence or other accommodations for mental health.

And at the largest companies, those with more than 10,000 employees, 86% of respondents reported increases in such requests involving mental health.

Yet Littler’s 12th Annual Employer Survey found that only 22% of companies had modified their policies in response to these rising accommodation requests.

Although policy changes often lag a year or two behind trends, the gap suggests that there’s a need for employers to address lingering effects of the pandemic and other issues affecting workers’ mental well-being.

For a lot of workers, the pandemic “severely” disrupted their professional and personal support networks, Littler shareholder Devjani Mishra said.

“Even if you had nothing on your mental health plate, so to speak, to begin with, with the extreme events that we all lived through individually and collectively, it seemed likely we were going to start seeing some of these issues going forward,” Mishra said.

Given that reality, Littler included in its survey the question related to mental health accommodations to put some numbers to anecdotal evidence.

“All those events and rituals that we participate in have really been sort of up and down over the past four years. All of that takes a toll,” said Mishra, a leader of Littler’s COVID-19 Task Force and Vaccination Working Group and a member of the firm’s Leave of Absence and Disability Accommodation Core Group.

“Those common experiences that we share that bring us together have been missing or have been compromised. I think everyone is feeling this, even if it’s just at a low level. Most people, including people who would never say, ‘I need a mental health accommodation,’ have really been challenged to get through the past few years.”

Take that and stir in worker stress from increasing workloads, caustic social and political divisiveness and geopolitical events of late.

Mishra said workers also are more familiar with accommodation and leave request practices since the pandemic. And they’re also more willing to self-disclose mental health conditions and neurodiversity issues, such as being on the autism spectrum.

“Our understanding of these conditions is still evolving. People are more willing to step up and say, ‘I’m a person who has this and this, and this is what it means to me.’”

Prior to the pandemic, employers may have had an easier time defending their position that a particular job required a person to be in the office. When “ someone is saying, ‘Well, look, I just need this flexibility. I’ll come in Tuesday to Thursday, but it would really help me if I could also have this other flexibility.’ That doesn’t sound as unreasonable to them as it used to be.”

Mishra advises her employer clients to do a “lot more concrete thinking” about what a particular job actually entails. “If an employer really drills down and thinks about it. there’s probably a lot of opportunity to create some flexibility that would better enable more people to work.”

An employer’s HR teams need to work with the business to determine whether they have legal obligations when an employee is in a protected class. “But part of the difficulty is it’s not strictly a legal question,” Mishra said.

“People would like there to be a magic answer where you can say, ‘Well, someone asks for this much in sort of a quantitative way, like that much is too much but this much would be enough.’ Mental health is really difficult to quantify that way.”

That’s where knowing what a job entails is crucial to help employers find creative ways to make accommodations, where possible, to keep a valuable employee. After all, it wasn’t long ago when many employers were complaining it was impossible to hire people, she noted.

“I understand it’s time consuming. It’s frustrating. It feels like it’s not real work,” she said. “It’s hard to manage. It does require creativity. It does require empathy and the desire to work with the employee and say, ‘OK, we can’t do that, but we might be able to do this other thing that’s close. Would that work for you?’”

The study found that employers in the retail and hospitality space were most responsive in expanding their policies to address employee mental health concerns, with 36% making changes compared with 22% across all industries.

The same applied to childbirth and related medical conditions in these sectors, at 57% vs. 36% across all industries.

Mishra said that’s probably because industries such as retail, hospitality and health care tend to have a greater understanding of job functions, such as how many rooms housekeeping needs to turn per day. Thus they can more easily determine how much additional help they will need stemming from an accommodation.

Related: Mental health in the workplace: Shifting from stigma to solutions is key for employers

Employers also need to keep in mind that younger workers don’t necessarily expect to have a long-term commitment to their employer and may be that much more likely to bolt if the company won’t help them address their challenges. “You have to continue to be a great company somebody wants to work for,” she said.

Seventy-four percent of employers surveyed said requests for mental health accommodations increased in the last year. The next big category of accommodation requests was pregnancy-related leave (53%) and hybrid or flexible work not related to health or family issue (50%).

Employers were most likely to have revised or expanded their policies to accommodate pregnancy (38%). That may be in part because the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act took effect last June. It requires employers with 15 or more employees make reasonable accommodations.

One lingering effect of the pandemic is the increase in working remotely for some portion of the work week. While the survey found 71% of respondents operate with some form of hybrid work schedule, more are shifting back to in-person work: 39% of employers are working more days in person than remotely, compared with 31% a year earlier.

Among other findings, 79% of respondents said they expect “moderate or significant” impact from compliance and enforcement by the U.S. Department of Labor in the next 12 months, compared with 65% in 2022.

The National Labor Relations Board “in particular has been pursuing an agenda to reshape U.S. labor law and overturn decades of well-established NLRB precedent, leading to significant changes affecting both unionized and non-unionized workplaces,” Michael Lotito, co-chair of Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute, said in a statement.