Is your business still failing to meet the mental health challenge?

It’s probably fair to say that you’d have to have been living under a rock for the last five years to be unaware that the world is in the grip of the most acute mental health crisis in living memory.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the workplace is the environment in which the problem is most likely to manifest. The typical climate of stress and pressure around deadlines, targets and results is the kind of pressure cooker in which mental health issues are more likely than not to thrive.

So, to find that a recent survey of businesses concluded that over half of UK managers have noticed an increase in workplace mental health difficulties may not feel like anything to write home about.

But it perhaps does help to explain why wellbeing has gained a lot more attention in recent years and why 43% of employers report that individuals have started discussing their mental health more openly than was the case before the pandemic.

Whilst that is concerning on one level, it’s also positive: talking about mental health is, after all, the first key step in addressing it.

Yet, just 12% of workers have confided in their managers, and only 1 in 7 of those who have discussed their issues with their manager felt that their concerns were addressed.

The survey, conducted by the Peninsula Group, a global employment law, HR, and health & safety consultancy and published at the end of March, also found that 9 out of 10 organisations do not provide mental health days to employees, despite the fact that a quarter of those managers surveyed report seeing an increase in sick days taken for mental health-related reasons.

Perhaps more tellingly, the survey also suggests that even though businesses are actively engaged with the task of providing mental health support, many still fail the litmus test of tailoring that effort to what is actually needed in their organisations rather than to those conditions that are considered to be generically most prevalent among the workforce at large.

There is another, equally worrying trend. According to the research, fewer than 1 in 10 managers say they feel able to discuss their own mental health issues.

This becomes even starker when you consider that two thirds of employers are labouring under the misapprehension that staff at all levels would feel able to talk to them and report their mental health concerns.

Finally, 85% of employers in the UK either do not offer mental health days or have no plans to do so in the coming year – exposing a significant disconnect between best practice and reality in the UK employer market.

So, what next?

First, it’s encouraging that so many businesses feel comfortable having conversations about mental health, since healthy workers contribute to a healthy workplace.

But it’s not enough to simply feel comfortable. Businesses that expect to thrive will need to do more to adjust to life in a post-pandemic world – a world punctuated so far by financial and economic uncertainty caused by the cost-of-living crisis which has been a clear trigger for mental health crises.

So, businesses should also keep in mind that everyone in an organisation – irrespective of seniority or pay grade – should have free and easy access to mental health support through clear, transparent and non-judgemental process and policy.

There is obviously still more work to be done in this area, but the willingness of employees – who always tend to be ahead of the curve on workplace trends because they are the ones driving them - to talk about mental health issues and shift in the way they are viewed and handled by their workplace are unquestionably huge milestones in the right direction.

The question is whether your business is able to keep pace with those step changes and adapt quickly to change needs and requirements in the mental health landscape.

If you’d like to know more about how Constantia Consulting can help you to shape your mental health policies so they are adaptable, agile and fit-for-purpose, please get in touch for an informal, no-obligation chat – we’d love to help.