Mental health advocates being trained in many companies

Mentioning your mental health challenges is no longer verboten in the workplace. Yet despite the progress made in this area, many employees and managers remain unsure how to verbalise their support and help those affected.

Pamela Lennon is a health psychologist and wellbeing consultant at Zevo Health, a workplace health and wellbeing provider. She works with clients such as Google and Facebook, carrying out wellbeing audits, risk assessments and recommendations for strategies to support employee health, wellbeing and psychological safety.

Lennon says that mental health is now an “important and timely priority” for organisations, with as many as one in six workers experiencing mental health challenges.

“As the pandemic fades from the spotlight, globally employers are struggling to manage a range of challenges from employee retention to productivity, all while employees show high levels of distraction, burnout and poor mental health,” she explains, adding that these issues are particularly prevalent among younger workers.

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The “always on” culture enabled by remote and blended working environments has increased dependency on technology but has also allowed workplace stress to filter into employees’ home lives, Lennon says. “This new way of working may have brought positivity for some but also impacts negatively on those who struggle to switch off from work and miss the social support of pre-pandemic work life.”

And as our ways of working have changed, so too have expectations of employer support. “Employees now expect flexible working conditions as well as effective wellbeing supports in a human-centric workplace environment, that is psychologically safe to be their diverse selves.”

But while there is now greater demand for awareness and openness around mental health, research has shown that over half of employees still do not feel comfortable discussing work-related mental health challenges with their manager. This alone highlights the need for continued improvement in this area, says Lennon.

So, how can organisations prioritise mental health? It’s not an easy task, Lennon admits, but the prevailing wisdom is that mental health should be incorporated across the organisation, which means including it in board agendas, corporate strategy and assessment of risk and job design.

“Management should continue to maintain a compassionate leadership approach, evident throughout the pandemic, to allow employees to feel comfortable to discuss any work-related mental health issues,” says Lennon. Training should also be provided to employees to help them recognise early signs of mental health issues in themselves, and their team, she adds.

Mary Connaughton, director of CIPD Ireland, has witnessed a paradigm shift whereby discussing mental health problems in the workplace is no longer taboo. “We have seen it become a normal topic of conversation in many workplaces, and the message has changed so that employees feel it is okay to talk about.”

CIPD carried out a survey among HR practices earlier this year that found 69 per cent of the respondents had delivered some form of mental health awareness programme, while 58 per cent had tried to encourage people to disconnect in order to protect their mental health and avoid burnout.

Despite this progress, being open about personal mental health challenges can still come with the fear of stigma and a negative impact on one’s career progression at an organisation. But Connaughton says it can be particularly powerful when senior leaders come forward to discuss their own mental health crises.

“What we have found is when you have a business leader in the organisation come out and talk about their own experience, it is extremely impactful. If they say they personally went through a tough time and suffered with their mental health, and explain how they sought support and dealt with it, that can really show that it isn’t career-limiting and getting help is the right thing to do.”

Many organisations are also now training what they call “mental health champions” or advocates, with employees at all levels who act as the first port of call for someone suffering with their mental health. “They can then refer on or say who the employee might go to to seek additional support if it needs that sort of escalation, but it helps people with that first step of starting to talk about it,” Connaughton says.

When it comes to normalising mental health issues, AIB group wellbeing officer Giles Barrett says the goal is to make people feel safe to discuss mental health and feel supported in addressing or living with their mental health issues.

AIB’s work to normalise conversations around mental health in the workplace includes dedicating an annual campaign to promote and encourage mental health awareness every September, which is Mental Health Awareness month in AIB. They also run mental health modules as part of their professional development programme. “This empowers people to identify colleagues who are struggling and equips them with the skills to support those individuals,” Barrett explains. During 2022, AIB launched its accredited mental health advocate programme, with one in 10 staff now a certified mental health advocate. “This has been a real game changer in terms of education, normalisation of mental health challenges and the provision of collegiate supports” says Barnett.

Providing training to support employees in navigating mental health conversations has enabled the bank to obtain better data around the prevalence of mental health issues within the organisation.

“Historically the data available in relation to the prevalence of mental health issues within the workplace was limited due, in part, to the perceived stigma in speaking about mental health at work and a lack of awareness around the impact of mental health challenges in the workplace,” Barrett says. “This will allow us to tailor our policies and practices to better support our colleagues,” he adds.