Making Workplace Mental Health Support Measurable, Trusted and Accessible

Christopher Bernardine Sr., WBC, is President of Unita’ and Chief Revenue Officer of EnhancedcareMD. He has more than 30 years of experience in the insurance industry, with a focus on enrollment, employee benefits, voluntary benefits and benefit communication. Throughout his career, Chris has held senior leadership roles with Combined, Aon, Beacon Benefit Communicators and Aflac. He earned the Workplace Benefits Consultant designation and has served on several industry boards and advisory groups, including the Voluntary Employee Benefits Board and the Mass Marketing Insurance Institute. He has also chaired the Business Strategy Council for LeadingAge and helped develop a national benefits and communication program for the organization.

Understand the Need

“Mental Health” is more than the new buzz word. Employees and employers alike rate mental health as the number one concern in the workplace.

Issues abound in society and of course these issues carry over to the workplace. In managing hundreds of thousands of incidents, there are four foundational learning’s to understand as you address mental health in your organization;

1. Employees need to know their needs are dealt with in a confidential and secure environment.

2. Having an onboarding engagement program to address pre-and-sub-clinical issues sets up greater acceptance.

3. Solutions need to be simple and stress-free choices so as not to complicate an already stressed situation and last, offer many access points to simplify the choices and the insights the employee gains by using the program.

The most common issues presented:

Since the advent of Social Media and the acceleration of concerns brought on by the isolation of COVID, the most common issues presenting in the workplace in order of presentation are as follows:

• Stress and Anxiety

• Depression

• Marital and Relationships

• Grief

• Trauma

Addressing these employees’ health concerns is of first priority and it matters. When all decisions are filtered by that overriding company objective, reduced employee engagement and productivity issues will resolve. Without a program, data suggests that nearly half, (49.8 percent) of participants have productivity issues losing an average 45 hours per month, and those who struggle are 67 percent less productive than a typical employee. Mental Health matters as employees matters.

Expectations for a Robust Program

A key part of your expectations is to establish a program where meaningful results will be measured and reported. The key parameters of a successful program include the following:

Assure you have an onboarding program that builds trust and engagement at lower levels of concern. According to NAMI, nearly 50 percent of employees who need mental health will not seek help due to stigma. Non-stigma pathways such as parental issues, grief and loss, financial stress breaks that barrier to care. This enables the addressing of pre-and-sub-clinical issues before they become a clinical incident.

Clinical programs cannot be singular in the approach, because people are not singular. Programs need depth in both assessing and caring for your employees. ployees.

Superior programs have both traditional clinical assessments and physical identification of mental health biomarkers to pair data and both highlight the need for urgent care and improve results. Provide many ways to engage with licensed professionals to meet any employee need: Effective programs include Face to face counsel, phone/video, text therapy, group sessions, psychiatric access and self-guided tools.

Measure Resolution Rates to Know You are Helping Employees

In an effective “mental health” workplace solution the tenets of expectations listed above are essential, including the ability to measure resolution rates. Resolution, therefore, is defined as the dual agreement amongst the counselor and the employee that no further counsel is needed.

Programs in market that integrate these many factors are hard to find and harder to manage. A key data point to work with is the resolution rates discussed above and reported below. If rates exist, that is a good sign and indicates there is a program in place that can be managed to deliver for your employees. Often, we suggest statistical studies to prove the confidence level of the resolutions reported.

A “Peer Reviewed” analysis is among those with the highest confidence that you are getting what you desire, particularly if they include longitudinal studies over time.

To give you an idea, resolutions we report are:

1. 78 percent of participants are resolved of anxiety concerns

2. 87 percent of issues related to depression

3. 74 percent related to the risk of alcohol abuse

4. 88 percent resolved with issues causing a productivity concern.

5. 91percent responded to asurvey that their stress was effectively managed by the program.

ROI becomes simpler in these scenarios, including:

In an onboarding engagement program, participation is a leading indicator of claims being avoided downstream. We have calculated that our Mental Fitness product helps avoid nearly 3.5 percent of the incidents. Resolution rates can be extrapolated to project reduced claims for those using the services and our data system shows a $3000 savings per active user.

The Next Steps

We suggest that the next step is to take some level of action. Here are some primer questions to ask yourself:

• Review your current program to see what might be missing and seek to fill those gaps.

• If you have access to claims data, determine if you have a growing claim rate for issues related to Mental Health? If you do not track that - the data is pretty clear - you do!

• Work with external resources such as your broker to see if they represent any programs they feel comfortable implementing and meet the needs identified within this article

• Talk to your carrier, most often they will be aware of the need and a program to address the needs. We know of two carriers that will pay or subsidize a program for you.

• Find data to spur you to action. Even anecdotally, your employees could be showing signs of fatigue or productivity loss that may not be monitored or measured?

• Act decisively. Time is value