How Your Organisation Can Better Support The Mental Health Of Staff

There is a growing awareness in many HR teams that support for mental health issues in the workplace must be improved. Too often wellbeing covers the physical, but the mental side is equally as important. Currently a hot topic in the media you may even have come across campaigns like ‘Time to Change’ and the Government Review ‘Thriving at Work‘.

These campaigns are setting out to try and get rid of the stigma surrounding mental health, allowing staff who suffer with any problems to understand they can share what they are going through and gain support from work.

In July I went to the launch of the Thriving at Work Toolkit, set up by the City Mental Health Alliance (CMHA). The toolkit aims to help businesses with 500 + employees become mentally healthy workplaces, based on the Stevenson Farmer review of mental health and employees, commissioned by the Prime Minister in 2017. The toolkit was developed by CMHA members which include The Bank of England, Hogan Lovells, KPMG, Goldman Sachs, PWC, The FCA, BNY Mellon and Legal & General. You can download the toolkit here, which provides clear interventions, good practice and self-assessment tools.

For those of you concentrating on wellbeing at work (and we know from our 2018 Wellbeing and Benefits survey that many of you are taking wellbeing seriously, with 54% of survey participants investing more than last year in staff wellbeing, 44% the same, whilst only 2% of organisations are investing less than 2017), we are absolutely certain that adding as much support for mental health to your benefits offering to staff as possible will be a brilliant way of attracting and retaining talented staff. It is what staff want – millennials have a far greater focus on ‘self care’ than baby boomers, indicated by the growth of consumer apps for mindfulness, CBT and online personal and professional coaching.

How Do You Deal With Mental Health Support At Work?

First of all, improve awareness and reduce the stigma surrounding mental health. This can mean leading from the top, perhaps getting key staff to share their experiences with others in the company.

Keep communication channels open so if people need to talk to someone, staff feel they can talk. From our 2018 Wellbeing Survey some initiatives organisations undertook to improve mental health wellbeing communication included regular informal catch ups among teams, and senior leadership speaking openly about mental health issues. This helps break down barriers and get staff talking, in an atmosphere in which they felt they can be honest.

Adding posters around the workplace with information on about services available to staff (back of toilet doors, kitchen area), would also make a huge difference. At Reward Connected, when we do benefit review focus groups with organisations to find out which benefits would actually suit them, we often discover that staff are unaware of the current benefits the organisation currently offers. This information, perhaps offering hotlines for financial advice or counselling, will help enormously those staff who have concerns but have not yet spoken out. In fact, language and communication can play a huge role in the successful uptake of staff benefits. Deloitte recently announced a change in the naming of its “Employee Assistance Programme” to “Advice Line”, leading to an increase in update from 6 – 27%.