How to promote mental health in the workplace
What is mental health?
We can think of mental health as a state of wellbeing that includes a person’s ability to realise their strengths and abilities. This means that when our mental health suffers, so does the rest of how we function — both at home and at work. Mental health also covers our ability to cope with the ordinary pressures of everyday life. When we’re under strain and our mental health is declining, we become more irritable than usual and experience stress more intensely.
Good mental health lets us thrive day to day. It means we enjoy what we do more, and we’re able to be effective and productive. We’re more willing to contribute to our community and the people around us. Every one of us has mental health, and it’s an important topic for everyone — mental health isn’t simply the presence or absence of problems.
Unfortunately, mental health difficulties are common and can carry serious consequences for both employees and employers. The most common workplace mental health concerns are burnout, anxiety, stress, and depression — all of which affect a person’s ability to work and their career development, as well as overall team performance and organisational culture, which in turn affects the company’s financial results too.
Looking at what can actually be done to support mental health in the workplace, activities broadly fall into two categories:
- proactive methods, aimed at preventing problems
- reactive methods, aimed at responding to problems
Proactive methods
As the name suggests, proactive methods are aimed specifically at preventing problems and supporting mental health. These include, for example:
- Assessing and managing psychosocial risks in the work environment. Psychosocial risks include things like excessive workload, low control over one’s own work, poor physical working conditions, violence, harassment, discrimination, unclear roles, job insecurity, and conflicting expectations. Employers can identify sources of stress and dissatisfaction and take steps to reduce or eliminate them.
- Offering training on mental health awareness, prevention, and coping, for both managers and employees.This builds knowledge and skills around mental health, reduces stigma and discrimination, and encourages both seeking and offering help — keeping mental health part of the conversation. When planning training, it helps to consider who exactly you’re trying to reach and what the goal is: while everyone benefits from general knowledge, managers and specialists sometimes need different skills based on their roles.
- Fostering a positive organisational culture that values diversity, inclusion, respect, trust, collaboration, and open communication.
- Providing flexible working arrangements that help employees balance work and personal life. This helps reduce stress, increases autonomy, satisfaction, and productivity, and accounts for the different needs and preferences of individual employees. It’s worth remembering that what worked two years ago might not work today — so stay in touch with your people and ask whether they need changes.
- Offering resources and options that support mental health and wellbeing, such as counselling, coaching, mentoring, peer support, wellbeing programmes, health insurance, employee assistance programmes, and access to information and services. Simply knowing that help is available is supportive in itself, since it provides reassurance that support is within reach if something happens. When an employer makes it clear and visible that “we’ve got your back,” it builds trust.
Reactive methods
Reactive methods are aimed at supporting employees who are already experiencing difficulties. These include, for example:
- Establishing and communicating a clear strategy and procedure for handling mental-health-related situations in the workplace, covering communication, openness, confidentiality, referral, return to work, and reasonable accommodations. This helps ensure consistency, fairness, transparency, and accountability, and protects the rights and responsibilities of both employers and employees.
- Training and supporting managers and direct supervisors so they’re able to notice, support, and manage employees experiencing mental health difficulties. This helps build a supportive, trusting relationship, enables early intervention and prevention, provides appropriate guidance and feedback, and helps coordinate access to necessary resources and services.
- Collaborating with employees facing mental health difficulties and their representatives, occupational health specialists, healthcare providers, and, where relevant, family members. Be part of the support network around the employee — you don’t need to do a lot; it’s enough to be there when you’re needed. Offering options to adjust working arrangements, including changes to tasks, working hours, work environment, tools, expectations, and goals. This helps reduce barriers and difficulties and allows the employee to do their work effectively and safely.
- Offering counselling, coaching, and mentoring to support employees’ mental health and wellbeing. This helps prevent mental health problems from deepening, while also helping people move back towards thriving. Through counselling, a person can build coping skills and resilience, and support self-care and recovery.
You may have already noticed that counselling services appear in this list under both proactive and reactive methods. As mentioned earlier, knowing that help is available has a preventive effect, and seeking support early helps avoid bigger problems down the line. At the same time, offering counselling options is especially important once a problem already exists: access to professional psychological support isn’t always easy for everyone (it can be too costly, and waiting times within the public system can be too long), but supporting recovery is extremely important.
And, of course:
- Regularly evaluating and reviewing the measures implemented, including feedback and their impact on employee performance, satisfaction, wellbeing, and recovery. This helps identify what’s working well and where changes or improvements are needed.
To maintain a clear overview of mental-health-promoting activities, it’s advisable to put together a mental health action plan. A mental health action plan sets out the goals, strategies, specific activities, and metrics for improving mental health within an organisation, and helps you be there for your employees.
If you need help carrying out an assessment, putting together a mental health action plan, or would like a partner to support your employees, get in touch with us.
Explore our mental health services and request a quote here.
