BEYOND INTERVENTIONS: A SYSTEMS APPROACH TO MENTAL HEALTH

The Mental Health Crisis

The world is in the grip of a mental health epidemic. Shockingly, 61% of employees globally have reported a decline in mental health over the past year. Markedly worse since Covid, which is understandable given what transpired over an extended period of time. Human psychological injury has created a burning platform for intervention at all levels. Anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbances are rampant. These issues translate to a staggering economic toll, with 12 billion workdays lost annually due to depression and anxiety alone. South Africa, unfortunately, ranks a dismal third in mental health quotient globally with no real solutions on the table.


The Leadership Challenge

Leaders, often under immense pressure to deliver results, tend to default to a directive style rather than connecting with their teams. While direction is essential, it’s the connection that fosters trust, empathy, a sense of belonging, and resilience. Employees yearn to be authentically heard, seen, and acknowledged. However, leaders themselves are grappling with their own complexity [possibly even their own mental health challenges], while playing multiple roles as parents, pastors, and counsellors to their people, in addition to their professional responsibilities.


Organisational Band-Aids

Many organisations are responding to the crisis with a flurry of well-intentioned but often (dare we say) superficial initiatives. ‘Carewashing’ is a term that is now being adopted to describe how companies say they offer mental health benefits just to check a box or at least attempt to offer ‘something’, while failing to truly address the underlying issues of employee distress and injury, and thereby failing to make any real progress to improve conditions.


A Framework for Change

To create a lasting and meaningful impact on employee mental health, we at Joint Prosperity believe that organisations need to embark on a profound shift in their core belief around people. This requires a multi-faceted approach that starts from within:


  1. Belief: A fundamental shift in how the organisation value people and their well-being. A way of being that is brave enough to address the real challenges.
  2. Holistic View: A focus on the entire employee, prioritising prevention, self-care, and personal responsibility.
  3. Psychosocial Risk: Identifying, measuring and managing psychosocial hazards through metric, as you would the business financials. According to Gallup, 2003, the main hazards are – role clarity, job demands, support, job control, physical environment, reward/recognition, organisational change management, workplace relationships, and organisational justice.
  4. Supportive Policies: Implementing policies and procedures that facilitate mental health support to show true commitment and prioritise systemic change.
  5. Targeted Initiatives: Offering programs tailored to the specific needs of the industry, organisation and its people.

In our experience many organisations start at targeted initiatives with good intent – but are then perplexed when real change does not follow.


The Role of All Stakeholders

Individuals, leaders, organisations, and HC departments all play crucial roles in creating a mentally thriving workplace. Individuals are encouraged to prioritise self-care, leaders to connect and empathise rather than direct, organisations to robustly invest in resources and support, and HC to be at the forefront of driving change – these actions will ensure excellence in meeting this need head on.


Conclusion

Addressing mental health requires a move beyond superficial interventions and demands that leaders look deeper and inward in an authentic and responsive way. It’s about understanding unspoken needs, building trust, and going to the core of the belief that people need to be valued and supported. After all, people ensure business success.

Are you ready to lead the change?


Sources:

  • Spring Health. 2024 Workplace Mental Health Trends. https://www.springhealth.com/blog/2024-workplace-mental-health-trends
  • Harvard Business Review. 2024. 5 Strategies for Improving Mental Health at Work. https://hbr.org/2024/04/5-strategies-for-improving-mental-health-at-work
  • Calm. 2024 Voice of the Workplace Report. https://business.calm.com/resources/guides/2024-voice-of-the-workplace-report/
  • Sapien Labs. The Mental State of the World Report 2023. https://mentalstateoftheworld.report/
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