Mental Health Awareness Training and Consultation
17 January 2017Mental health is, despite a growing movement to address its importance in the workplace, unfortunately still considered by many to be one of life’s taboos.
Mind’s latest estimate is that mental ill health costs UK businesses around £26bn a year in lost productivity, and the OECD estimates that our failure to cope adequately with mental health issues costs the UK some 4.5 per cent of its GDP.
The number of days taken off work with mental health problems has increased 25 per cent year on year and stress, depression and anxiety together rank as the largest reason for absence in the workplace. Official statistics suggest that 127 million hours of work were lost in 2015 due to mental health-related absence – the equivalent of around 75,000 individuals losing the entire year.
However, by emphasising the commercial impact of ignoring mental health and the ethical importance of employee care, advocates are now beginning to tackle old taboos. They are encouraging openness and establishing much-needed support systems to ensure that employees are not only given the best chance to remain mentally healthy but, conversely, to equip those on the front line to deal sensitively and appropriately with individuals when they have become unwell.
A number of organisations have begun to take important steps in this direction, but much more needs to be done. Organisations that do not yet have policies in place, or are concerned that what they do have falls short of what is necessary, need to take steps to address this. A key part of this process for managers/partners and appropriate HR contacts should be:
- Consultation in order to better understand the horizon and what should be being done in the immediate and longer term; and
- Training in mental health awareness, to identify and assist employees who may have, or be developing, a mental health issue.
Whether or not organisations have an ethical responsibility to look after the mental wellbeing of their staff, case studies like that of Barclays, who found that for every £1 invested in the mental health of staff, they were able to recoup £7, prove that it quite literally pays for organisations to be mindful of mental health. The business case is clear.
Our experts are high-profile leaders in the field of mental health in the workplace. They have extensive, senior level, business/corporate experience between them, and some also bring with them ‘lived experience’ of mental health issues. They are actively involved in campaigns and initiatives across the corporate space to raise awareness around mental health and address the stigma that still remains. They are able to translate these into specific workplace initiatives for client organisations and their staff, to deliver bespoke mental health awareness training, and to assist with the establishment of onsite “mental health champions” amongst many other offerings.