Balancing budget constraints with benefit needs: Lyra's guide for leaders

Employees are still struggling with daily and longer-term stressors that are preventing them from being productive and agile in the workplace. Benefit leaders are struggling to find solutions that check all the boxes, without breaking the bank. 

"The good news is that there's a lot that employers can do to help support mental health that doesn't require a hefty budget, whether that's peer support programs or ERGs or training people about mental health and promoting mental health literacy," says Joe Grasso, VP of workforce transformation at mental health and wellness platform Lyra Health. "They're not always very expensive, but they require time."  

Read more: Why are workplace benefits still overlooking burnout?

Benefit leaders need to embrace an all-hands-on-deck approach to mental health support: Lyra's State of the Workforce mental health survey found that 41% of employees cited stress as their top mental health challenge. In the workplace, that materializes as emotional exhaustion, difficulty concentrating, diminished morale and a lack of clarity about priorities, Grasso shared. Not only is that affecting an individual's ability to perform, it has long-tail impacts on the business, too. 

"The underlying theme to a lot of those stressors is this element of uncertainty. Employees don't know whether their job is secure. It's harder for them to stay agile, it's harder for them to sustain focus," he says. "If you have someone who's having a hard time staying focused and a hard time adapting to this constant onslaught of change and feeling of uncertainty, it's going to affect their performance and how they show up at work, too."

In a recent Leaders conversation with Employee Benefit News, Grasso shared how leaders should be responding to sustained stress in the workplace, free and low-cost ways benefit managers can provide support, and how to pick a mental health benefit that's the right fit for an organization's budget and demographic. 

How aware are business leaders around the struggles that employees are still experiencing today? 
We are in a period of compounding and prolonged stress. Employees are navigating political polarization, war, global conflict, economic instability, and also a wave of organizational disruption. Where we see some of the disconnect is on the responsibility of leaders in addressing some of what they see. Employees need leaders who can communicate frequently and transparently. They need leaders who role model vulnerability and who can just acknowledge what's hard. 

When leaders are seeing these stressors, simply acknowledging and validating that they're there, that it makes sense that people are affected by what's happening at the world at large, what's happening in the organization, that there is very real uncertainty, that's kind of a baseline requirement before employees can engage in any kind of initiative to help them be agile or adaptive. They need to feel seen, heard and understood first. That's where leaders hold a lot more of the cards than they might realize or at least acknowledge. 

Leaders themselves are also under pressure. What are some of the challenges they're facing when it comes to addressing mental health through their benefit decisions? 
We are certainly seeing that there is more pressure on decisions about benefits because of budget constraints. We're seeing that there's greater scrutiny around the ROI of benefits: The extent to which people are using them, and the extent to which people are getting better as a result of engaging with benefits. There's also a new kind of recalibrating of expectations among employees that drives pressure, too, where they're saying, some of these mental health benefits are table stakes to us. This puts benefit leaders in a tight position.  

Read more: How this Google exec is approaching mental health benefits in today's world

I think the good news is that there's a lot that employers can do to help support mental health that doesn't require a hefty budget, but they require cross-functional effort. A benefits leader can't unilaterally do a lot of these things, even though they tend to own a lot of the mental health strategy. So what we've been working with employers on a lot more recently is, how do you create these cross-functional relationships with your colleagues who have responsibility to workforce mental health, whether or not they realize it. The more that those functions can come together and create a more cohesive and coordinated mental health strategy, the less that it has to fully rest on the benefits leaders' shoulders, and the less that it's as vulnerable to the changing budget constraints year–to-year that benefits leaders have to deal with.

What are some of the elements of an ideal mental health strategy for today's workforce? 
There's a new savviness about mental health. Mental health conversations are part of everyday language. So that means there's a demand for care that's more hyper-personalized. It's knowing that there's going to be providers that are tailored to my needs, that the care is going to be culturally responsive, that it's going to address a full spectrum of conditions. There's also this need to present the care options in a way that makes people feel like it reflects their identities and their lifestyles.

Oftentimes, employers have had different point solutions for different pieces of this. Employees are wanting a more varied solution set, and then employers on their end are wanting to consolidate their point solutions. They don't want to manage six to eight vendors. And so I think there's this demand from both sides to have a solution that's really comprehensive, but also all through the same vendor. It's holistic for the employee, and it's easier to manage and centralized for the employer and the benefits leader. 

Check out the entire conversation with Joe Grasso right here.