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Is Your Company Investing in Mental Health?

It’s now more important than ever for employers to consider investing in mental health resources for their employees if they haven’t done so already. With one in five adults experiencing mental illness within a given year, employers can’t turn a blind eye to the importance of supporting and providing employees with the tools they need to overcome and cope with mental health challenges.

Anxiety is an all-too-common threat in the workplace. It’s an employer’s responsibility to create the type of environment they want their employees to work. Medical benefits are great to have, but it’s important to remember mental health benefits should be a part of it. This investment helps boost employee wellbeing, resulting in lower total medical costs for the employer and a reduction in the number of missed workdays.

With virtual platforms now more accessible than ever, here are 7 digital mental health programs to consider investing in for your organization.

  1. Headspace – This program offers access to an entire library of 500+ meditations. It provides sleep sounds, music, and wind-down exercises with workouts specific to releasing tension, including yoga.
  2. Calm – This program brands itself on promoting better sleep and offering stress and anxiety reduction techniques. In addition, they provide companies a launch strategy and ongoing marketing resources.
  3. Happify – This program provides online therapy and self-guided coaching, with a focus on changing negative thoughts and gaining back control of your feelings with cognitive behavior at the forefront.
  4. Fabulous – This program gives employees a place to go for daily self-care. It advertises itself as an app that uses behavioral science to help people follow through on their good intentions.
  5. Lumosity – This program touts itself as the brain game’s solution to improving memory and increasing focus with personalized training insights.
  6. THINK’n – This program breaks things into bite-size modules geared towards decreasing stress and improving resiliency.
  7. Neuroflow – This program uses AI to determine employees who are high-risk for mental health issues. People can view videos in the library that cover everything from coping skills to relaxation techniques.

In addition to doing the right thing for your employees, investing in mental health for your workforce can also save the company money. These savings aren’t necessarily immediate but will be experienced over time if you take care of your employees’ mental health.

Put yourself in the employee’s shoes. How would you feel working for a company that thinks greatly enough of you to invest in your mental wellbeing? Not only will it make you feel cared for and healthier, but studies have proven that if an employer invests in mental health, it makes employees more productive. That’s a win-win for employee performance and employer results, on top of the long-term healthcare cost savings.

With the increased awareness of mental health in society, it’s on the employer to change the culture and structure of your organization to support it. Everyone responds to their emotional baggage differently. Some people seek out therapy, and some people bury it with silence. The workplace can be a place where it’s acceptable to talk about mental health. This doesn’t mean everyone will want to, but employers providing a platform for employees to discuss will help improve overall workplace mental health and morale.

If recent events haven’t proved otherwise, there’s a need for employers to address mental health in the workplace. Between the overall savings it provides an organization and opening the door to discuss mental health, investing in mental health removes the stigma and makes for a better place to work.

Is Mental Health an initiative at your company? Start the conversation on LinkedIn and check out Offboarding Employees: How to Execute Successfully.

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