By Mark Newey, Founder, www.headucate.me…
Health and Wellbeing at Work Week takes place on March 15-19th. Is your organisation providing enough support for employees? Perhaps you have Mental Health First Aiders in your workplace, but find there’s a missing link between them and your Employee Assistance Programmes? Are your employees calling out for more in-depth mental health assistance?
As we all know the nation is not only in the grips of a Covid pandemic, but also a mental health epidemic, and it’s vital that company’s support their employees through these difficult times.
You’re not alone, the current levels of happiness and wellbeing at work makes dismal reading:
- 78% of employees in 2020 were negatively impacted by their mental health 1
- 76 percent of people believe their company should be doing more to protect the mental health of their workforce. 1
- 60% of UK office workers feel lonely at work 2
- 85% of workers globally do not feel engaged with their job 3
The starting point to creating a healthy, happy and committed workforce is to help improve their mental wellness. This is not about waiting until the employee’s stress, anxiety or depression is so bad that they need to see a therapist, which is the approach of most current Employee Assistance Programmes. Powerful and inspirational support means being pro-active and creating a supportive network as a natural part of a workplace team.
As we grew up none of us were taught about mental wellness: how our minds work, how we create our reality, how our emotions work, who we are and what we want. At school we never sat down and took part in Mental Wellness Education: it’s never been part of the curriculum.
But Mental Wellness Education can give employees the tools to succeed. It’s a simple, pro-active and revolutionary approach to mental health that can easily and cheaply be delivered online to transform your employees’ mental health, now that’s music to the ears of your CFO!
The platforms for learning about mental wellness are: Self Awareness, Self Esteem, building a Life Vision and Self-Empowerment. As simple as these are, when you look closely, almost nobody has them, because extremely few of us have ever done any self-discovery work.
The outcomes of mental wellness education are enormous and include a dramatic improvement in relationships, such as increased teamwork, employee motivation, loyalty plus increases in efficiency and productivity with decisions made quicker. Organisations also note a large decline in staff management problems, less absenteeism, presenteeism, leavism and sickness.
The Return on Investment (ROI) for expenditure to improve employee mental health is beyond doubt. Interventions that achieve the highest returns of 11:1 tend to have the following characteristics 4:
- They offer a large‑scale culture change, or organisation‑wide initiatives supporting large numbers of employees.
- They are focused on prevention or designed to build employee resilience.
- They use technology
It’s time to revolutionise and transform the mental wellness of your company’s employees. The extra uncertainty and anxiety coming from the pandemic and lockdown makes 2020/2021 the ideal time to invest in the future of your staff.
To discover more about mental wellness education in the workplace, visit www.headucate.me.
1 Oracle and Workplace Intelligence 2020: https://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management/ai-at-work/
2 Jo Carnegie, ‘The rising epidemic of workplace loneliness and why we have no office friends’, Telegraph, 18 June 2018, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education-and-careers/0/risingepidemic-workplace-loneliness-have-no-office-friends/
3 ‘State of the Global Workplace‘, Gallup, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238079/state-global-workplace-2017.aspx.
4 Deloitte: Mental Health and Employers January 2020
