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Spring has been a particularly busy time for mental health awareness at work.
Companies have taken every opportunity to trumpet their approach to mental health issues, from highlighting burnout to the impact of global government elections. Many responded to Stress Awareness Month in April, which was quickly followed by Mental Health Awareness Week in May.
But an extensive report by a coalition of companies, including Deloitte and BP, suggests those efforts may have been in vain.
Nearly a third of 12,000 people surveyed by the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health said they would not tell their boss that mental health issues were the reason they had to take time off. They had reason to be cautious: Half of the people who disclosed such problems said they had been discriminated against at work as a result.
Even after all those awareness campaigns, only 22 percent of people thought the stigma around mental health in the workplace had decreased since the pandemic. Less than half of respondents said their workplace offered useful support when it comes to mental health.
What’s going wrong? The GBC, which has produced some of the most important research into mental health in the workplace, says part of the problem is that we don’t talk about it enough. One of his top recommendations is for senior managers to openly address mental health, which he says makes employees feel more supported. “One test of a culture is that people are able to say, ‘I’m having a bad mental health day today,’” says Poppy Jaman, president of the GBC.
But talk can be cheap, according to Kevin Teoh, director of organizational psychology at Birkbeck University. Real changes, such as addressing pay disparities, reducing workload, or giving people more control, are just as important, if not more so, than promotion or awareness. “You may have a manager who is very understanding, but if the policies are not implemented, what’s the point?” he says.
If the problem is aspects of the job (unsatisfactory tasks, bullying bosses, unmanageable schedules), talking about company commitment and encouraging staff to talk, and then doing nothing, can make the situation worse. “People say they are invited to be vulnerable, but then they don’t get the support they need. . . “Staff can feel like they are being gaslit.”
However, it is not always enough to act: it has to be effective. Simon Wessely, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, says his research suggests this is not always the case with now-ubiquitous initiatives, such as schemes that give staff access to independent counseling or therapy. “Interventions outside the organization, such as employee assistance programs, do not work well, primarily because… . . “Most people don’t use them anyway.”
Nor are they particularly important, he says, the attitudes of chief executives or other senior bosses: it is good line managers who really make the difference. “It’s not about knowledge: Sending middle managers to courses to learn more about mental health increases their knowledge, but it doesn’t seem to translate into improvements for their employees,” says Wessely. But having managers learn new skills, such as listening to difficult conversations and practicing them through role-playing, does improve things.
Wessely and Teoh’s suggestions involve thinking seriously about what it’s like to work somewhere. Taking steps like improving benefits for staff or giving managers the skills to support their teams is more difficult than getting leaders to open up about mental health or encouraging staff to say they’re struggling, or even offering support services. external advice.
Individual interventions, Jaman says, are “crucial”, but they change “the culture, the work environment…”. . . It is what is really beneficial.” In the report, recommendations include specific training for line managers to have difficult conversations or respect the need for staff to take time off.
Could we, as Wessely argues, be approaching “peak mental health awareness”? Evidence that workplace attitudes remain discriminatory towards mental health issues suggests this is not the case.
But if staff are going to talk about mental health, employers need to be sure they’re going to make it count – and that means more than just talking.