Companies provide services, encourage connections as they prioritize mental health

Indianapolis-based Lessonly has always tried to be a wellness-oriented company, a place where CEO Max Yoder regularly communicated with employees about taking time to mind their physical and mental health.

Still, when employees faced with the stresses of the pandemic last year started asking for help to cope, Megan Jarvis, the company’s vice president of talent, realized Lessonly’s benefits in that area were lacking.

“The answer I gave was never one that I was in love with,” she said.

Sure, the training-software tech firm offered health insurance. And it had an employee assistance program, a benefit that traditionally offers some counseling for mental health and financial problems and referrals to specialists.

But Jarvis said that EAP was a bit of an afterthought, an add-on benefit that came with other services the company offered.

“It didn’t feel like a warm handoff,” she said of referring employees to the EAP. “I didn’t feel the confidence that I want to feel.”

So in January, Lessonly began offering an enhanced employee assistance program to its 200 workers that offers more services to employees in more ways. That can mean counseling via text or a little cash to pay for a service—like yoga—that can help a worker de-stress. And the program is available not just to employees but to their families as well.

In addition, the EAP coordinates with Lessonly’s health insurance by ensuring that employees who need longer-term counseling or additional services are referred directly to an in-network provider who is available to see them.

“Mental health is not like getting stitches,” Jarvis said. “It can take a fair amount of time to deal with. It was important we had that warm handoff into our benefits plan, into a long-term provider. So people are not left without a solution.”

Lessonly worked through Indianapolis-based First Person Advisors to offer the enhanced EAP program. And it’s not alone.

Many companies have been looking for new ways to help employees cope with the uncertainty, stress and anxiety that has come with the pandemic, said First Person Vice President Laura Butler.

“The pandemic has shined a big spotlight right on mental health for multiple reasons,” she said. “It brings an emotional and mental toll when you’re used to doing everything one way and then, all of a sudden in March 2020, the way you’ve done things in the past doesn’t work anymore.”

The kids are at home. The office might be at home, too—often with multiple people trying to use it. The gym is closed. You can’t see friends except through Zoom. The news on television is stressful.

It’s a recipe for an unproductive and unhealthy workforce—and one companies had to manage remotely.

Consider that nearly 83% of workers in a Mental Health Association survey conducted over several months in 2020 said they felt emotionally drained by their work. And yet only 41% of respondents said their supervisors were providing the emotional support needed to manage their stress.

In addition, more than 60% of Americans in a poll the American Psychological Association commissioned in February said they had experienced undesired weight changes since the start of the pandemic. Two-thirds said they had struggled with sleep—either sleeping too little or too much. Nearly half of fathers who were home with kids during the pandemic reported drinking more to cope with the stress.

“Our customers are telling us that [the pandemic] has just put a different twist on mental health for all their employees,” Butler said. “What we are hearing now, more than 15 months later, is that the need for mental health services has really made an impression on employers.”

Coming back

And although the pandemic appears to be easing, the stress might not be.

Many employees who’ve spent more than a year working at home are now heading back to the office—and for some, that can create a new kind of anxiety.

“You have every range of emotion” among employees, Butler said. “You have fear, you have caution, you have excitement, you have everything in between.”

The challenge for managers is trying to address all of those individual situations, to provide care and support wherever workers are on that spectrum of emotion.

“Even if you only have 25 employees, that’s 25 different places to meet employees,” she said. “If you have 200 employees, you have 200 different places to meet employees. So that’s a real challenge.”

One key, Butler said, is trying to remove the fear and stigma employees might feel in acknowledging they need help. That means making sure workers understand the services available to them. It means pushing out guides and resources—which are often free and available in the community—that employees can use when they need them. It means providing the most flexible services—like remote counseling—when possible.

And it means leaders must set an example.

That’s what Marcus Hall has been trying to do—improve the conversations about mental wellness at the regional California Closets franchise where he is CEO and model those behaviors.

Hall and his leadership team actually started thinking about the mental health of employees before the pandemic.

The company had for several years been doing employee surveys through Emplify, which has since been acquired by San Francisco-based 15Five, and saw warning signs in the data. Employees weren’t explicitly talking about mental health, Hall said. Instead, they said they were concerned about their workloads or the ability to take time off.

“So, it seemed like an important thing for our team to start to discuss,” he said. “And we also talked about the need for leaders to know the people on our teams, know what they’re battling, what they’re facing and what support they need. It might be two [computer] monitors, but it also might be some support to take some time off due to a family issue or a challenge in life.”

One concrete step the company took was creating a mental health day each fall, when the office closes and employees are told they can’t do any work. Instead, they’re to use the day to do something that “gives you joy, something that fills your tank, whatever that might be,” Hall said.

“And then we share stories of how people spent that day—and it runs the gamut,” he said. “I try to lead by example in this regard, as well as our leadership team. We take the day off and I go mountain biking and read a book. I isolate myself to recharge my own batteries.”

It’s just one day, he said, but the act of closing the office sends a signal that the company is committed to employees’ mental health and wellness.

“Then I think we just have to give [employees and managers] space for conversations,” he said. “We still conduct the employee surveys a couple of times a year, but we talk every week at our leadership meetings about what employees are going through, who might need extra support, extra care, who might need some time off, what department might need extra support.”

Sometimes it’s the managers, he said.

After a tough 2020 that included layoffs, California Closets’ business is booming again, which creates yet another kind of stress. So Hall recently told everyone on the leadership team to take a mental health day, “just because they’ve been working really hard and they’ve got to protect themselves.”

‘Burnout is a real thing’

Santiago Jaramillo, who co-founded Emplify to help companies monitor employee sentiment and improve employee engagement, said recognizing when employees need relief is important. He’s now a senior leader at 15Five, which acquired Emplify, and the company has analyzed thousands of data points from surveys at hundreds of companies over the past year.

“One of the things we’ve uncovered … is that there was a significant increase in employee burnout during the pandemic,” Jaramillo said. “That’s significant because of the impacts that can have on employees’ mental health and the cost to the company in terms of a lack of productivity.

“Burnout is a real thing—and it’s something you can’t just take a prescription for,” he said. “Many times, it requires slowing down and having a healing journey.”

A key driver of burnout, he said, has been the lack of social connection as employees have worked from home.

“Many have now realized how much of their appetite for social and human connection was met at work,” Jaramillo said. “And when that went away, there was a real absence—and it’s not like friends and family were easy to be with, either.”

That social connection is something employers need to think about as they plan their post-pandemic workplaces, he said. Regardless of where employees are working, they need ways to connect—with co-workers and with managers.

In fact, Jaramillo said one of the things that became most evident during the pandemic is the importance of great managers.

“You need people who can recognize the warning signs of somebody who’s [struggling] and make sure that they feel connected to easy resources to get help,” he said. “It’s difficult for HR to monitor that at all times.”

As a result, Jaramillo said, many companies have been investing in leadership training and development to equip managers with the skills to detect and address employees’ challenges, be they emotional or physical.

Companies have also been adding more wellness-related benefits for mental health. Like Butler at First Person, Jaramillo pointed to enhanced employee assistance programs as well as meditation apps, fitness challenges, financial advice and other programs designed to encourage employees to take their own physical and mental health seriously.

“There’s an increased move toward employers investing in the whole person,” Jaramillo said. “They want to invest in the whole individual versus only the bits that are likely to be productive to the company. The goal is leading with empathy.”•