Employee mental health has become a top three business issue over the past few years. Organizations are developing a new appreciation that mental health is not simply about having programs to support those requiring clinical treatment. It is also about having a team that is mentally healthy—capable of bringing their best focus and energy to the workplace every day. We call this broader interpretation “mental fitness” to distinguish it clearly from mental illness. Mental illness impacts as many as 1 in 5 adults. Mental fitness, however, impacts 5 in 5.

Why Should Business Leaders Prioritize Employee Mental Fitness?

Employees who are flourishing (versus languishing) will have:

  • Higher productivity
  • Lower accident rates
  • Increased adherence to policies and procedures
  • Less time away from work
  • Stronger engagement scores
  • Lower risk of mental illness

What Can Be Done?

Mental health is an enigma to many leaders. Beyond making treatment programs available for those with mental illnesses, concrete actions to promote personal flourishing and prevent mental illness are often unclear.

We believe it’s worth considering how organizations manage physical safety in the workplace—and borrowing some elements from leading-edge Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) programs. OHS programs are often mature, sophisticated processes, supported by legislation and board-level oversight. Below, we describe four mechanisms used to protect physical safety and suggest how to apply these concepts to employee mental fitness.

  1. Train Employees How to Do It

A foundational element of physical safety programs is training. Employees are taught how to:

 

  • Conduct themselves safely in their roles
  • Operate equipment correctly
  • Recognize and anticipate risk areas
  • Report risks or accidents

These training sessions are regularly refreshed to ensure employees remain up to date.

 

Similarly, organizations must provide programs to teach employees the basic skills needed to strengthen mental fitness. Education systems worldwide fail to equip individuals to cope with today’s complex world, leaving us to figure it out ourselves. The good news is that mental fitness skills are teachable and can improve with consistent effort. 

When exploring solutions for developing mental fitness, consider these two critical points:

  • Mental fitness is not a ‘one and done’ program. Developing strong mental fitness requires continuous awareness and consistent practice. Like physical fitness, mental fitness erodes without regular exercise. Ongoing training and periodic refreshers are necessary to maintain resilience and flourishing.
  • Engagement is essential. Providing content or apps alone is insufficient. Employees must actively engage with the material over time to develop mental fitness skills into habits. Passive learning—such as watching a video or reading an article—is not enough. We recommend picking a solution that places a premium on habit development. This typically involves requiring the employee to actively engage in structured practice activities over a reasonable length of time. 

 

  1. Implement a Mental Health Pause

Some employers with advanced OHS programs use a “safety pause,” where employees stop and reflect on safe practices to protect themselves and others. These pauses often kick off meetings, from executive sessions to frontline team huddles. This simple action is a powerful habit for building and maintaining a physically safe culture. 

 

We encourage adopting a similar process for mental health—a “mental health pause.” During this pause, employees can reflect on:

 

  • One action to promote their mental well-being
  • How their actions support the health of others

This practice may feel awkward initially, but it can quickly become a rallying point for improving mental health.

 

  1. Incorporate Mental Health into Your Management Cadence

Organizations exposed to physical safety risks realize that when an accident happens, it’s too late. They recognize that accidents are preventable and proactively measure risk indicators. Preventative metrics are often shared beyond the C-suite to boards of directors and are built into executive scorecards. 

 

We are struck by the general lack of data available to monitor employee mental health, as well as the analytics capability to gain insight into the situation. We recommend implementing these four (at a minimum) key metrics: 

1. Employee Wellness: If you want to proactively improve employee wellness, you need to constantly measure it. There are a variety of ways to do this. Pick one that is simple to use and gives you a continuous, real-time view of where your employees sit on a flourishing to languishing scale. We use a blunt and effective tool called the ‘Battery Charge’ to measure and visualize employee wellness.

2. Employee Resilience: A person’s ability to improve their mental health is determined by their mental fitness skills. The stronger the skills, the greater the ability to bounce back from adversity and spend more time flourishing. As an employer, it is crucial to understand where your group sits. In the long term, we believe it is important to consider mental fitness abilities when hiring new employees. 

 

3. Program Adoption: Many wellness programs or apps suffer from low adoption rates (often under 10%). This is simply nowhere near high enough to move the needle on wellness across your employee population. To drive adoption, you need to measure it by collecting real-time data on how often employees are actively investing effort in developing their mental fitness skills. 

 

4. Psychological Safety in the Workplace: Employee wellness is also impacted by workplace culture, which makes ensuring an environment that supports flourishing critical. A culture that drains employees’ energy works against your efforts to drive strong mental health. 

 

Workplace culture is typically measured using engagement surveys. We recommend two important shifts to this approach:

A. Expand your definition of engagement to adopt a broader approach based on psychological safety standards emerging around the world. While there is considerable overlap between typical engagement questions, psychological safety explores other areas that have important effects on wellness. See some of those areas in the illustration to the left.

 

B. Shift from annual or quarterly surveys to a constant pulse survey approach. Real-time data is crucial to monitor the constant ebb and flow of an organization. It is also essential for ongoing assessment and improvement of efforts to improve culture. Collecting data once a year is simply not enough. 

 

Gathering real-time data for those four key metrics is critical, as is the ability to analyze it. Analytics tools can help you compare performance across different business functions/geographies/units and deep-dive into characteristics such as age, ethnic background and other demographic aspects. This filtering capability gives you the insight needed to test what’s working and constantly refine your programs to drive higher impact. 

 

Adopting these and other measures and including them as a standard part of your leadership scorecards and management cadence can go a long way to improving employee mental health. 

 

  1. Leaders Lead

Leaders in sophisticated OHS organizations accept that they ultimately have accountability for the physical safety of their employees. They recognize that an accident can affect the lives of their staff, their families, suppliers, and customers, while also having far-reaching consequences for business outcomes and reputation. They also understand that people are imperfect—and bring risk to work that is influenced by factors well beyond the work site. And yet, they go the extra mile to promote safety using the strategies described above.

 

We urge organizations to take a similarly proactive stance on employee mental health. We acknowledge this will make some uncomfortable, as the question “How can I be responsible for the mental health of my employees?” often arises. We suggest that there’s really no choice. The impact of poor mental health on key business metrics is daunting. Leaders simply can’t afford to tolerate poor mental health in their population or wait until somebody develops a mental illness to act. 

 

A Final Point

The premise of this article is the critical link between employee mental health and business performance. However, there is also a higher calling: employers have a unique opportunity to improve societal mental health. With the ability and motivation to invest in personal mental health programs, organizations can provide the structure, leadership, metrics, and processes to make a real impact. Strong employee mental health doesn’t just transform the workplace—it enhances lives far beyond it.

About the Authors

John Moore

John Moore is a Founder and CEO of Mental Fitness IQ Inc, a company dedicated to help employers shift from traditional mental health treatment offerings to focus on preventative support - helping employees be their best every day. He is the former Managing Partner, PwC Consulting (Canada) and national leader of IBM's Systems Integration business.

Noah Ennis

Noah Ennis is the sales/marketing manager at Mental Fitness IQ. With nearly two years of experience at the company, Noah has been pivotal in the growth and development of the mfIQ platform.