Reasons Why Workplace Mental Health Initiatives Fail

A core imperative of a psychologically safe workplace is for workers and leaders to feel comfortable speaking up without fear of retribution and promoting accountability and learning. Research from Google’s Aristotle Project demonstrated that psychological safety is critical for a high-performance team.

Since Covid, many human resource professionals have been tasked with exploring how employers can maximize the employee experience, including facilitating workplace mental health initiatives. These initiatives include providing support programs like EFAP, cognitive behavioral therapy, and access to psychological services and benefits plans. Other projects facilitate prevention programs such as training leaders to become psychologically safe leaders and promoting mental fitness to help workers spend more time flourishing (feeling charged) than languishing (feeling blah) through digital mental health apps.

Many HR leaders and CHROs facilitate workplace mental health strategies by planning and initiating budgets. However, few HR professionals have the necessary domain knowledge or competency in workplace mental health and psychological health and safety.

While HR and OHS professionals can obtain professional designations, no professional bodies provide designations in workplace mental health and psychological health and safety. These designations would provide the knowledge and skills to facilitate and implement standards in the workplace, such as the CSA Z1003 standard on psychological health and safety in the workplace.

Many countries’ HR professionals are leveraging the standard as a guide for implementing workplace mental health programs. The challenge is that standards provide guidance on the what but not the how, leaving individuals without the expertise to determine what they should do.

As HR leaders and CHROs put more effort, resources and budgets toward workplace mental health and disability management, the primary focus is on programs and policies perceived as what organizations can do to mitigate mental health risks and promote mental health. The typical motivation is to reduce workplace stress and mental harm and promote mental health initiatives that create an enjoyable workplace. However good the intention, this does not necessarily mean a reduction in workplace mental health concerns like disability due to mental illness.

Why are many organizations’ mental health initiatives failing to have an impact?

The following are reasons employers’ efforts to facilitate workplace mental health fail to achieve impact. Such measures include reducing mental health short-term disability claims, retaining workers and decreasing the time workers spend in the mental state of presenteeism.

• Focusing On Programs Instead Of Behaviors - the desired outcome is not the number of employees participating in a program or policy. It’s understanding the key performance behaviors (KPBs) that maximize workers’ and leaders’ opportunities to experience a psychologically safe workplace. Creating a psychologically safe workplace is like OHS, which focuses on creating habits that promote and protect workers. The first step for employers to create psychologically safe workplaces is to be clear on the psychosocial factors and hazards that can negatively impact the employee experience, which I've written about previously. ISO 45003 guides HR professionals on the behaviors that can protect employees, but when not done well, they could result in mental harm. For example, work demand can be a charge or a drain, and how work is organized can create a positive workplace experience or put workers’ health at risk. The WHO states that over 750,000 workers die yearly from working long hours.
• Neglecting To Understand Barriers That Prevent Employee Engagement - Offering workers programs when they are concerned about privacy or stigma or lack literacy and time to benefit from programs often results in lower-than-optimal engagement. Being unclear on when employees are allowed to access the programs also can have an impact. Many HR professionals fail to consider what barriers may make it difficult for workers and leaders to engage in a program. I've spoken before about the necessity to plan for workers’ resistance to new mental fitness or other prevention programs. Seeking to understand the barriers beyond the stigma that can inhibit employee engagement can be beneficial. One proven strategy is asking workers and leaders what programs are and are not working for them and seeking to understand why. Eliminating barriers requires much more effort than sending out a random email. It needs a measured action plan that continues to draw workers’ input.
• Lack Of Measurement - Employers who care about workers’ mental health offer supportive and preventive programs and spend energy on planning and implementation. A common mistake is focusing on the Plan-Do portion and not on the Check-Act part of the Plan-Do-Check-Act framework. Offering programs is an important step. However, it is essential to understand what programs are being used and how workers value them. This is the only way to understand if programs are working as intended and creating the required habits. Employers need a plan to correct the forgetting curve, measure the value of program investment and understand how to evaluate the ROI. Program participation alone does not mean transformation or new habits.
• Not Anticipating How Hard It Is To Change Human Behavior - Many people tend to stop what they are doing when they feel good—something I've referred to before as the "feeling good trap." When focusing on workers’ and leaders’ mental health, remember that developing a new habit requires adherence. Some employers mistakenly think giving an employee access to a digital mental health app will have an impact. Some well-designed and researched apps can be a great gateway to preventing mental illness or encouraging help-seeking behaviors. However, many fail to facilitate adherence past a few weeks without attaching the app to a strategy or program that involves follow-through, encouragement and incentives.

The critical insight for HR is to have a plan focusing on behavioral change and methods to encourage workers trapped in learned helplessness to discover the road to learned optimism. We would never expect someone to believe they are physically fit after one session on a Stairmaster. One-and-done programs seldom provide workers much more than awareness and rarely result in transformation because information is useless without action and follow-through. I've spoken previously on the nuances of creating a psychologically safe work environment.

HR leaders tasked with crafting workplace mental health strategies can avoid falling into the above traps when designing such initiatives.

Jump Start is focused on engaging workers in the benefit of daily mental fitness. MENTAL FITNESS is the behaviours that facilitate mental health. This approach is also designed to minimize the forgetting curve by supporting workers with extra learning materials and follow-up sessions.

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