How does employee mental health and well-being play a part in an organisation’s business strategy?
Over the past few years, supporting mental health and well-being has become a workplace concern, but many organisations are still navigating how to incorporate it into their strategies.
In our recent talk, The Business Case for Mental Health in 2024, panellists Dr. Candice Schaefer (Global Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being Expert) and Sabrina Ooi (CEO, Calm Collective Asia) shared how mental health and well-being help with talent attraction, retention, and engagement, as well as what companies can do to build organisational and individual resilience to help employees survive and thrive through change.
Here’s a roundup of the key insights from the panel discussion:
1. Mental health is foundational to business success: It affects talent attraction, employee engagement, retention, performance, and overall business health.
Our speakers highlighted how mental health and well-being have served different functions for organisations over the past few years.
Prior to the pandemic, companies focused on offering attractive well-being benefits packages, including mental health resources, in order to attract talent amidst a highly competitive talent market.
During the pandemic, with lockdown measures and restrictions, remote working became the norm and created a need for companies to focus on keeping employees stable through supporting well-being and preventing isolation. As a result, mental health and well-being became central to engagement and retention efforts, as employees struggled with isolation and burnout.
In the post-pandemic era, there is a continued push for the provision of mental health benefits. However, with increasing economic stressors and volatility, the hunt and competition for talent has gone down. As a result, employers are feeling less pressure to keep these benefits at the top tier, resulting in less of an organisational focus on mental health. These changes end up creating a risk to employee well-being and potentially hampering business goals.
Additionally, to meet the demands of younger generations, the role of the organisation is increasingly one where it has to take into consideration the relationship of the employee with the organisation. The perspective on what work should be in one’s life is changing drastically. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the values of senior leadership and younger generations who are coming in expecting something very different from their employers.
Sabrina shared her observations on how ‘hustle culture’ has been so ingrained for millennials to the point where working overtime and working on weekends has been normalised. As a result, millennials are working to the point where they’re feeling burnt out and then when they’re being laid off, they face an existential question: what was all of this for? Meanwhile, Gen Zs are placing greater importance on work-life balance, with them asking for hybrid working arrangements and autonomy from their employers. These are important factors that are increasingly affecting talent attraction, employee engagement, and retention for younger employees.
2. Approaches to workplace mental health and well-being should be strategic rather than a one-off ‘band-aid’.
When asked how a workplace mental health and well-being strategy intersects with an organisation's overall business strategy, Dr. Candice highlighted the importance of ensuring that mental health and well-being directly ties into your business KPIs, rather than serving as a ‘band-aid’. She emphasised that having one-off initiatives or watching the trends of your competitors and saying ‘we need to offer that’ isn’t a strategy - that is simply trying to appear similar to your competitors in order to attract talent.
A workplace mental health and well-being strategy involves looking at both internal and external programming that supports the employee as a whole.
Dr. Candice also acknowledged the fact that employers struggle to visualise the internal side of a mental health and well-being strategy, because it’s easier to hire a vendor for external programming than it is to identify, create, and implement internal programming. This is where Calm Collective helps coach employers to create an internal ecosystem that supports employees as a whole from a mental health perspective.
Sabrina shared a case study from one of Calm Collective’s clients, BBH Singapore. BBH realised that while they had access to several external well-being programmes such as training for managers, there was still a major source of stress for employees: as a creative agency, there was an unsaid expectation for the turnaround time to be extremely quick for communications with their clients, which had significant effects on employees’ sleep and their ability to function during the work day and week. To address this critical issue, BBH decided to implement a set of new service level agreements in every new client contract, whereby clients were not to expect an overnight turnaround time and should be prepared to wait up to 2 business days instead. This single change shifted the way that everyone in the organisation felt, improving their mental health, performance, and perceptions of BBH as an organisation. Employees felt a lot more appreciated at work because in this case, their company looked at the root causes of stress in the workplace and directly addressed them.
3. A strong mental health and well-being strategy aligns with your business KPIs, demonstrating the value of mental health initiatives to employee performance and the bottom line.
Dr. Candice underscored the importance of ensuring your mental health and well-being strategy aligns with your business KPIs. Choosing which metrics are your KPIs comes down to what your business cares about. Common metrics that businesses have used include:
Retention or attrition
Absentee work days
Revenue
Employee engagement
Cost of healthcare claims (as mental health is one of the most costly medical claims made by younger employees)
It’s important to make sure that there is a linear connection between your chosen metric and its impact on workplace well-being.
Ultimately, going back to your KPIs and determining how you expect this to change as a result of improved mental health and well-being is a good way to connect your workplace mental health and well-being strategy with your organisation’s overall business strategy.
One of the biggest challenges in implementing workplace mental health and well-being strategies is getting senior leadership buy-in. Continual measurement of the impact of your mental health and well-being programme through quantitative and qualitative KPIs will help build the case for mental health within your organisation.
4. Managers and leadership are key to shifting organisational culture.
When asked about the role of organisational levels in workplace mental health and well-being, Sabrina raised that managers are a key lever in shaping organisational culture in big organisations, as they play an integral role in determining whether employees join a job (attraction) or stay in a job (retention).
Dr. Candice elaborated by sharing how people managers are becoming a strong component of both mental health and productivity for all employees, but no one is trained on how to be a good manager. When we hire people or promote people from within to managers, it is usually because of strong technical expertise rather than people management ability. The transition from a non-managerial role to a people manager is often very tough, as it involves thinking differently about interpersonal dynamics and the impact on workplace hostility, toxicity, and interpersonal conflict. Therefore, it is vital to consider how we are preparing and training prospective managers to manage others.
Sabrina noted that existing training for managers tends to be hard-skills oriented (e.g. ensuring team alignment, running team meetings, task prioritisation, performance reviews). When it comes to mental health, managers typically have been taught to understand what mental health is and is not, and what to do if someone in the team is facing a mental health challenge. However, in order for a mental health conversation to take place, people need to feel psychologically safe. At Calm Collective, we work with learning and development teams to create bespoke micro-trainings to teach managers about how to become better listeners, what psychological safety is and is not, and how to create inclusive environments that enable learning, contribution, and ability to challenge and voice out concerns.
Apart from managers, leaders also need to signal to the organisation that workplace mental health and well-being is a priority. Perceived lack of time is a major barrier to implementing a workplace mental health and well-being strategy. Managers are handling several things at once, managing interpersonal dynamics, being accountable for the team, and handling themselves. Often, it’s hard for managers to even show up to mental health and well-being trainings due to their multiple responsibilities. Therefore, getting senior leaders to take the first step to make workplace well-being a priority can make all the difference to your organisation.
Sabrina shared a case study of Calm Collective’s client, Zuellig Pharma (ZP). The CEO of ZP wanted to shift the organisational culture to be more compassionate, with the ability to listen to other people’s perspectives but also lend a helping hand if the situation calls for it. By hosting a talk on practising self-compassion at work, which engaged over 500 employees across the APAC region, the CEO of ZP was able to highlight the importance of creating an inclusive and safe work environment to empower their employees to reach their full potential.
The time to invest in mental health and well-being at work is now.
By prioritising mental health and developing a comprehensive well-being strategy, businesses can not only improve employee well-being but also ensure their long-term success through meeting key business goals and supporting the employee as a whole.
Calm Collective Asia helps organisations normalise mental health conversations at work through our consultancy services, programmes, and training. Learn more about our corporate offerings for workplace wellbeing here.
Download our slide deck featuring key insights on The Business Case for Mental Health here.