How employers can get employees to use their mental health benefits

3 ways to get employees to take advantage of mental health benefits

May 24, 2021 2:55 PM

What good is offering expansive mental health benefits if employees don’t know how to take advantage of them?

Ninety two percent of CEOs reported that their companies have dedicated more resources to supporting employees’ mental health as a result of the pandemic, according to a recent survey by Ginger, a virtual mental health platform. Still, seven in 10 workers say this is “the most stressful time in their entire professional career.”

The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of resources, according to Keith Kitani, CEO of GuideSpark, a change communications platform. Rather, it’s that companies may not be making it easy for employees to take advantage of available benefits.

“One of the things that we’ve seen over the last year is there's just so much more digital noise out there,” Kitani says. “And so it's becoming incredibly hard to reach and communicate programs to employees, especially as you think about some of these enterprises that have different demographics.”

In a continued effort to address the growing need for support, companies have started rolling out programs and platforms to better serve employees. For example, Amazon recently launched WorkingWell, a comprehensive program that provides employees with physical and mental activities, wellness exercises and healthy eating tips.

But without the proper means of promotion, all of these initiatives go unused — and employees go underserved, Kitani says. He shared a few tips with us on how to ensure that your employees are aware of what kind of offerings they have at their disposal:

Communication

Adding a mental health resource is useless if it won’t help its target audience, Kitani says. Understanding what your employee base needs can only be made possible by open and healthy communication.

“You have to think about communication holistically,” he says. “Too often people focus on a single program and look at employees through a single lens. By taking a holistic approach to the programs you have and to the different needs of your employees is the first step.”

Within a diverse workforce, different demographics will have a variety of needs — more than half of working moms are feeling anxious and over a third of Black, Indigenous and people of color said they sometimes felt down and depressed compared to 26% of White respondents. Employers should be enabling conversations that include every member of their workforce, according to Kitani.

“Enterprises are diverse and they are distributed and they're digital,” he says. “Effectiveness is not about a one size fits all solution, it's about starting to customize the solution.”

Connection

After employers have designated what mental health benefit offerings will best suit their workforce, Kitani encourages employers to ensure they’re fostering a connection between their mission and their employees. Sending a one-off company-wide email isn’t going to cut it.

“It can't be one message,” he says. “It has to be thought of as a campaign — how to communicate in a way that shows empathy and that shows connection.”

The key, according to Kitani, is not only to diversify approaches but to keep them consistent. Some employees may need posters in the break room, while others may benefit from an open-forum slack channel.

“Just because you have a program or strategy doesn't mean it's connected to employees,” he says. “We've created this gap between the strategies and programs of the organization and connecting them with employees … because many of the traditional ways are just not effective in today's today's current work environment.”

Culture

The conversations being had and the connections being made should be working towards a much larger goal of bettering company culture, according to Kitani. In the end, building a company culture around themes of wellness and inclusion will only continue to promote the first two steps in years to come.

“Things like creating a dialogue, getting feedback from employees and finding ways to support them [is achieved] through training your managers better,” he says. “[Communicate] cultural inclusion and wellness as a message to your organization and reinforce that through things like dialogue and manager support.”